Victorian Authenticity and Artifice:
Abstracts and Biographies
13-15th July 2015
Institute for English Studies, University of London
7th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association
1
Counterfeit Ancestry: Heredity, Appearance and the Inscrutable Body in Grant Allen’s
Fiction
Will Abberley
The author Grant Allen was obsessed with origins and the tendencies of the body to both
expose and conceal them. Born in Canada to Irish, French and English ancestry, he lived
among diverse peoples in various countries before establishing a literary career in London.
Allen was fascinated by theories of heredity and biological disguises such as camouflage and
insect mimicry. He also wrote a great deal about how languages spread across populations
through history, complicating and falsifying national heritage. This paper argues that Allen’s
sensation fiction drew on these interests to explore the unreliability of the body as a measure
of ancestry. His novel The Scallywag revolves around a descendant of aristocrats, whose
latter-day impoverishment leads society to mistake him for a commoner. Other works such as
‘The Beckoning Hand’ and In All Shades depict human bodies concealing miscegenation
between races as characters’ appearances fail to register their mixed ancestry. Often, the
ambiguous physical body is overridden by artificial dress, manners and culture, suggesting
that ancestry is a matter of performed appearances. Similarly, tales such as ‘The Curate of
Churnside’ question criminal and eugenic typologies, suggesting that beautiful bodies can
hide psychopathic hereditary urges. However, Allen’s fiction equivocates on these questions,
sometimes also presenting the body as an authentic index of ancestral character and origins.
Allen was unconvinced by eugenic efforts to mechanically measure racial tendencies through
physical bodies. However, he defended ideas of racial ‘instinct’ and ‘intuition’, suggesting
that bodies read each other’s ancestry unconsciously, beneath the surfaces of social life and
rational thought. In this way, his stories often depict characters recognizing hidden racial
origins or psychopathic tendencies in others through moments of mystical epiphany. For
Allen, bodies vacillate uncertainly between authenticity and artifice, sometimes
counterfeiting hereditary origins and character, other times revealing them.
Biography
Will Abberley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford. His
monograph English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850-1914 is being published by
Cambridge University Press this summer. His current research project explores Victorian
concepts of biological mimicry and disguise, from camouflaged butterflies to racial ‘passing’.
William.abberley@ell.ox.ac.uk
2
Newgate Women: Female Criminals in Jack Sheppard and Catherine
Philippa Abbott
Among the criminals portrayed in ‘Newgate novels’ (a popular genre of fiction between 1830
and 1847) female criminals are greatly under-represented in comparison to their prosecution
for crimes during the period. This paper will argue that where women, and particularly
female felons, are represented in these novels, they are bound to middle-class conventions of
femininity which are unsettled by the agency and energy of the fully criminal woman.
In The Hanging Tree (1996) V.A.C Gatrell highlights the fact that, during this period, the
middle and upper-classes did not feel threatened by female transgression. In her article
“Women Who Kill: An Analysis of Cases in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century
London” (2013), Kathy Callahan examines female perpetrators of crime between 1783 and
1815 and uses the data she collects to highlight cultural patterns to crimes committed by
women, reaching conclusions similar to Gatrell. I would like to pick up on the conclusions
Callahan makes in her article and link them to the under-representation of female criminals
over a shorter period, with a focus on two key texts: Jack Sheppard (1839) by William
Harrison Ainsworth, and Catherine: A Story (1839) by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Hostile critics, including Thackeray, gave the name of ‘Newgate novel’ to the genre, due to
its subject matter and the fact that the protagonists were either taken directly from the
Newgate Calendars or could easily have been part of the pages. Thackeray’s Catherine is a
satire on the Newgate novel and distinguished by its female protagonist. However,
Ainsworth’s text is a true Newgate novel with all the hallmarks Thackeray loathed. I will
consider the effectiveness of Thackeray’s satire and contrast his female criminal protagonist
with the representation of women in true Newgate novels. I will examine the ways in which
each novel relates to contemporary conventions of femininity.
Biography
Philippa Abbott is 26 years old and studying part-time for a PhD at the University of
Sunderland on ‘Plotting Crime Fiction 1780-1840.’ Philippa is looking to attend more
conferences relating to her project in the near future and is continually looking for
opportunities to share her ideas and expand her knowledge.
3
Kipling’s References to Theosophy in his Indian Fiction: A Charismatic Culture Broker
Mikako Ageishi
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), the well-known 19th century Anglo-Indian writer, once
mentioned in his own autobiography, “At one time our little world was full of the aftermaths
of theosophy as taught by Madame Blavatsky to her devotees.” As her contemporary, he
wrote a story “The Sending of Dana Da” (1888), a parody on “Mahatma Letters” which was
one of Blavatsky’s main deceptive tricks but it also mesmerized many people in its day.
Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, established in New York in 1875, then moved to
India and created a foothold there where her charisma proved to be very strong, as well as her
fraudulence. This was exposed by an internal informer and she was branded as a fraud by the
Society for Psychical Research. Nevertheless, only 3 years after that, another branch of the
Theosophical Society that was established in London, (which was in the empire which
controlled India at that time) welcomed her. Why had so many people continued to be
attracted and fascinated with Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophy even after her pseudoreligious philosophy came to light?
This paper will explore why Theosophy so flexibly pervaded both the Eastern and Western
worlds, especially India and Britain, through Kipling’s Indian stories such as “The Mark of
the Beast” (1891) and “The Return of Imray” (1888). And I will also focus on his idea of his
“sending” related to Blavatsky’s “manifestation” considering the need in those days for
scientifically categorizing the realm of the spirit and the human longing to see a spirit
physically manifested. Tracing back historically to practices such as the “royal touch” and
mesmerism, the relationship between Eastern enchantment and Western medicine will also be
discussed within their colonial contexts.
Biography
I am currently an Associate Professor at Hokkaido University of Education, JAPAN. I
graduated in English Literature at Tsukuba University, gaining my PhD degree before
embarking on an academic career in 2003. My PhD thesis is about Rudyard Kipling and
Hybridity in the Late 19th Century Western Representation.
4
‘So Polished and Insincere’: Silver Fork Novels and the Boundaries of the Real
Danielle Barkely
This paper will focus on the genre of the silver fork novel, a form of popular fiction that was
highly visible in the early Victorian era, yet was always met with dubious critical regard. In
their emphasis on representing the material details of elite lifestyles, silver fork novels
quickly gained a reputation as artificial and inauthentic. I will argue here that this notion of
the silver fork genre as inauthentic, which extended to debates about whether key texts could
even really be thought of as ‘novels’, was shaped by assumptions about the narrative norms
established by realist fiction, and the ways in which silver fork texts departed from these
norms. I will focus on three main narrative conventions, illustrating each with a short case
study from a silver fork novel. Part one will look at how silver fork novels violated
conventions surrounding a closed and organic ending by examining Benjamin Disraeli’s
Vivian Grey. Part two considers how silver forks novels deviate from expectations of
multidimensional characterization through an exploration of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham
and part three will look at the representation of objects through a discussion of Catherine
Gore’s Mothers and Daughters. While the discussion of each novel will be necessarily brief,
the paper will strive to introduce a selection of important but still understudied authors so as
to provide a representative overview of the silver fork genre. By shedding light on the often
unspoken assumptions about what narrative features legitimized a novel, and how the
absence of those features could lead to critical neglect, this discussion touches on themes that
are relevant to the study of a variety of forms of popular fiction. This paper would readily fit
with the special session on genre boundaries.
Biography
Danielle Barkley holds a PhD from McGill University, where she currently works as a course
lecturer. She will take up a position as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for English
Studies, University of London in spring 2015. Her current research focuses on the
relationship between realism and nineteenth-century genre fiction.
5
No Inspector Bullock: Popular Authenticity and a Recognizable East Lynne
Lucy Barnes
One of the bestselling novels of the nineteenth century, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) was yet
more remarkable as a theatrical phenomenon. During the first forty years after the novel’s
publication there were at least thirty different dramatic adaptations performed in both England and
America, and East Lynne’s most famous line: “Dead! dead! and he never knew me; never called me
mother!” comes from T.A. Palmer’s melodrama East Lynne (1874) rather than Wood’s pen.
Theatrical adaptation is necessarily freighted with concerns about authenticity. Since East Lynne
proved so fecund, this paper will use it as a case study to explore how we might determine the
authentic version of a story and what it means for us to do so. Wood’s novel, after all, first appeared
in serialised form in The New Monthly Magazine before it was published in three volumes.
Alterations were made in the transition between the two formats: might the novel, then, be the first
retelling? Does this unsettle the tendency to afford the novel pre-eminence, and allow us to consider
adaptations of the story as something other than derivative and inauthentic copies of an original?
The proliferation of versions of East Lynne allows us to trace a kind of popular authentication of the
story, which developed via the process of theatrical adaptation itself. By paying attention to new
elements, such as the popular role of Inspector Bullock, and examining what is maintained from
adaptation to adaptation, we can see which aspects of the story resonated with nineteenth-century
audiences – and which, therefore, were retold. These reiterations created a popular version of East
Lynne that bore, in many aspects, little resemblance to Wood’s novel, and which arguably created a
greater impact, as the familiarity of Palmer’s line makes clear. These adaptations require us to
consider whether authenticity is a quality inherent within a particular text, or whether it can be
conferred by the recognition of a popular audience.
Biography
Lucy Barnes is in the third year of her PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she is exploring
theatrical adaptations of English literature in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. This paper is taken
from her research on the many stage versions of Ellen Wood’s novel, East Lynne.
6
Charles Dickens and the Art of Speech-Making, 1857-1870
Emily Bowles
The after-dinner speech occupied an unusual literary space for the Victorian public figures called
upon to deliver them: it blurred the boundary between public and private and between fiction and
non-fiction and, despite strict formal conventions, allowed some individuality and experimentation.
The speech might also be circulated in pamphlets, newspapers or, in the case of Charles Dickens,
from an important part of biographies for over a hundred years.
Dickens was an uncommon case among speech-makers: according to Trollope, “He spoke so well,
that a public dinner became a blessing instead of a curse, if he was in the chair” (Hollington 452).
However, much less attention has been paid to Dickens as a speech-maker than as a public reader,
even while his earliest biographers used anecdotes from them verbatim to describe his life, taking
them out of context to serve their purposes.
This paper will explore the ways in which Dickens used speech-making to shape his public image in
the 1860s, at a time when his relationship with the public was on shaky ground following his
separation from his wife. By exploring key speeches from this period, I will show how Dickens
created a particular image of himself and his career and gave glimpses of the life he wished he had,
rather than the troubled upbringing revealed in Forster’s seminal Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74).
I will argue that speech-making worked with Dickens’s writing, giving him another medium with
which to experiment and allowing for the particular blend of authenticity and artifice that recurs in
his journalism and fiction.
Biography
Emily Bowles is a PhD student at the University of York. Her thesis focuses on Charles Dickens’s
changing representations 1857-1939, exploring his self-representation in the 1860s and the
development of his posthumous reputation. She is also editing Dickens’s short stories “George
Silverman’s Explanation” and “Holiday Romance” (Victorian Secrets, forthcoming 2015).
7
Re-Visioning Harriet Coram: Tattycoram and the Art of Conversing with Dickens
Lucy Brown
Audrey Thomas’s 2005 novel Tattycoram takes a minor character from Charles Dickens’s Little
Dorrit and reinvents her as a heroine. As well as offering a re-visioning of the character of Harriet
Coram, the novel also intersects with Dickens’s biography, with Harriet employed as a servant in
the house of the novelist who eventually fictionalises her without her knowledge. Thomas’s novel,
then, operates on several levels as a work of fiction in its own right, an intertextual examination of
Little Dorrit, and as a conversation with Dickens and those around him. For instance, Thomas
invites parallels between the treatment of Harriet Coram by Dickens and Tattycoram’s strained
relationship with the Meagles in Little Dorrit. At the end of the novel, by explicitly questioning
whether a genius author possesses ‘scruples’, Thomas segues into metafiction and briefly
interrogates the role of the author when Dickens literally flees from the woman he has represented
on the page. This paper will examine the three strands of Tattycoram with particular reference to
Thomas’s depiction of the interactions between Dickens and Harriet which purport to offer an
authentic vision of the author even while Harriet berates Dickens for offering an authentic vision of
her in Little Dorrit.
Biography
Lucy Brown is a PhD candidate at the end of her studies at the University of Sheffield. The title of
her thesis is “Devotion and Identity in the Works of Edmund Yates and Wilkie Collins” and her
research interests include sensation fiction, period drama and queer representation. She has an essay
entitled “Queer Lives: Representation and Reinterpretation in Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton
Abbey” included in Upstairs and Downstairs: The British Historical Costume Drama on Television
published by Rowman & Littlefield in December 2014.
8
‘No Safe Place for Travellers’: Anglo-Egyptian Politics and the Fictional Construct of Gothic
Egypt
Ailise Bulfin
This paper will examine the curious conjunction between the intensification of a British imperial
difficulty and the development of a pervasive literary construct in the late-Victorian period. After
the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the canal route had quickly become the lifeline of the British
empire and the surrounding territory of Egypt pivotally important to the global balance of power.
To ensure access to the canal, Britain unofficially occupied Egypt in 1882 and the unstable status of
Egypt following this move became a source of escalating dispute with both emerging Egyptian
Islamic-nationalist groups and the other European imperial powers. As fear of losing access to the
vital waterway became one of the most pressing imperial concerns of the era, a cycle of Gothic tales
positing the irruption of vengeful, supernatural, ancient Egyptian forces within civilised, rational,
modern England began to burgeon. The most extreme of these is Guy Boothby’s Pharos the
Egyptian (1899), a Gothic extravaganza of Egyptian retribution on a catastrophic scale, and the
theme recurs in texts by other notable fin-de-siècle popular authors including Arthur Conan Doyle’s
‘Lot No. 249’ (1892), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven
Stars (1903), not to mention in a host of obscure periodical stories, such as Eva M. Henry’s ‘The
Curse of Vasartas’ (1889) and K. and H. Prichard’s ‘The Story of Baelbrow’ (1898). Most of these
tales, which tend to follow a markedly similar plot structure, include a significant episode set in
Egypt in which the country is insistently gothicised and cast as a location of grave danger to the
representatives of imperial Britain who traverse it. This paper argues that the complexities of and
difficulties posed by the political quandary known as the ‘Egyptian Question’ were refracted
through popular fiction to produce the artificial construct of Gothic Egypt, a place which existed
solely in the Victorian popular imagination and bore no resemblance to the real country underlying
it, but which may have been influential upon the very situation that informed it.
Biography
Ailise Bulfin is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English at Trinity
College Dublin. Her research project, the monograph Gothic Invasions, investigates the fin-desiècle phenomenon of invasion fiction, a paranoid literary development that responded to
widespread social concerns about the possible invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign
forces in the period between 1890 and 1914.
9
Spirit Optics: Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies
Merrick Burrow
In 1922 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published a book, The Coming of the Fairies, in which he
concluded that a series of photographs taken by two young girls in Cottingley Glen, near Bradford,
constituted empirical evidence of the existence of a spirit world that, in his view, ‘has not been
shaken in the least degree by any of the criticism directed against it’. Nothing did more damage to
Conan Doyle’s reputation than this episode, leaving many to wonder how the creator of Sherlock
Holmes, that most perspicuous detector of fakes and frauds, could have been so easily duped.
Doyle, along with scientists such as William Crookes and Oliver Lodge, belonged to a wider and in
many respects progressive social movement that perceived a utopian possibility in the potential of
modern science to redeem the world. In contrast with the pessimistic vision of the figure of the
detective, whose revelations concern a catastrophe that has already taken place, Doyle turned in the
years after WW1 towards a kind of popular modernism that dreamed of the imminent revelation of
an afterlife in which his own bereaved generation might be reunited with the vast ranks of the dead,
not as faith in the supernatural but as an objective possibility.
In this paper I will argue that we need to look beyond the question of Doyle’s gullibility in order to
see how his optimism was driven by an engagement with the science of the unseen, from
cinematography to x-rays and radio waves. The Great Detective’s own leaps of reasoning are not,
perhaps, so very different as he sifts clues, disregarding the prejudices of common sense in order to
pinpoint the distinction between the impossible and the merely improbable.
Biography
Merrick Burrow is Principal Lecturer and Head of English & Creative Writing at the University of
Huddersfield. His research is primarily concerned with popular fiction from the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. He has published on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Sir Henry
Rider Haggard and G.K. Chesterton, and on Walter Benjamin’s critical theory.
10
Artificial Tongues in R.L. Stevenson’s Island Stories
Ellie Byrne
As Ian Duncan notes, some of the severest criticism levelled at Stevenson was the artificial/fake
nature of his writing style. A style that contrary to realist strands of fiction had what was termed an
‘artificial tongue’, which might best be understood as a kind of ‘literary marquetry’, decorating that
which could be said much more plainly. Stevenson is even accused of writing out his tales in plain
language and then rewriting to create a florid and fantastical style. A kind of window dressing on
top of the earlier scaffolding of the story itself, where style itself is artifice.
Similarly when we look at his Island writing, Stevenson’s style does not conform to novelistic
norms. It is seen as a kind of conjuring trick that produces the language and cadences of the speech
of the people Stevenson represents in works like The Ebb-Tide and Treasure Island. This paper will
explore different kinds of artifice at work in these texts and consider how simulations of the oral
tradition and oral stories create suggestively unstable properties in his narratives. They are caught
between faithful reproduction of the speech of racialized or exoticised others or fabulations and
fantasies that mark Stevenson’s highly stylised presentations of the stories of Samoa and Hawai’i
that are recorded/re-worded in his fiction.
Biography
Dr Ellie Byrne is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her current
research interests are the colonial and postcolonial Pacific and its literatures. She is working on a
monograph on literary and filmic representations of Hawai’i.
11
Putting on a Show: The Bicycle and Conspicuous Display in Allen, Gissing and Wells
Eva Chen
This paper seeks to move beyond the bicycle’s familiar association with women’s emancipation and situate it
as an integral part of the late-Victorian commodity culture of spectacle and conspicuous display. For a short
time during the mid 1890s when costs were still high, the bicycle was one of the most advertised
commodities and a must-have fashion statement for the rich and upward mobility for the less well-off. It was
also the best public platform to stage new styles of clothing and accessories. Even the great controversy over
the New Woman’s rational dress was as much about traditionalist unease over disruptions to female
decorum, as about the high visibility cycling afforded to the rider’s costumed body and the inextricable links
between cycling, display and fashion. This goes to explain why public attitudes toward women’s bicycling
changed in 1895 and 1896 from initial scandalization to later acceptance, because rather than direct public
support for the New Woman or her calls for social change, this change rested more on a general perception
of the bicycle as a commodity of fashion, novelty and upper-middle-class status, a perception greatly aided
by the manoeuvring of the bicycling industry and their advertisers.
As performances of a new modern subjectivity of fashion, progress as well as privilege, cycling
problematizes the boundaries between surface display and authentic interiority. But it also entails levels of
display and new forms of hierarchization that differentiate the “real” from the impostors who are less able to
use conspicuous display to stage a new self. In H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll
(1896), the cockney drapery assistant Hoopdriver goes on a cycling holiday on an old battered bicycle, and is
treated like a lord by working-class folks along the road, as an equal by a man in drab - “evidently a swell,”
and even for a moment mistaken by Jessie, the rich New Woman riding a new Safety that “couldn’t have
cost much under twenty pounds,” for her gentleman companion. The latter, Oxford man Bechamel,
immediately sees through Hoopdriver and resents this “greasy proletariat” wearing a mass-made, cheap
imitation of his own expensive brown riding costume. The bicycling Hoopdriver, as well as his later clumsy
imitation of a knight errant on wheels trying to save Jessie the maiden in distress, amounts to a show based
on false premises and illusory dreams of social mobility.
In George Gissing’s short story “A Daughter of the Lodge” (1901), a gardener’s daughter seeks through
education to assert her parity with the New Women ladies she works for, only to be put down by the bicycleriding, bloomer-wearing New Woman daughter of her father’s employer. Despite her books and ladylike talk
and manners, she is publicly humiliated and her inferior status exposed by her inability to afford a bicycle.
When she refuses to open the gate for the New Woman daughter’s bicycle, her family is evicted out of their
lodging and she is forced to apologize and acknowledge her servile status. The bicycle and all the visual and
symbolic trappings that come with it have now become a most visibly constitutive part that tells the real New
Woman apart from the wannabes/imposters. In Grant Allen’s novel The Type-writer Girl (1897), the bicycle,
in a different twist, becomes a crucial symbol of lingering privilege that tells the newly impoverished New
Woman heroine from the real typewriter of the novel’s title. Though reduced to typing for her livelihood,
Juliet still clings on to her weekend cycling as a release from the drudgery of her typing work, a privilege
that her typist friend Elsie never has. When Juliet is unable to pay her rent, the mere mention of “a bicycling
trip” and “tour in Sussex” is enough to convince her landlady that she “had thousands at her banker’s” and
would pay later.
This paper will first situate the bicycle in the late-Victorian commodity culture of conspicuous display, and
then move on to the three fictional works.
Biography
Professor Eva Chen teaches at the English department of National Cheng-Chi University, Taiwan, and is the
author of three books and numerous articles on women and popular culture. Her work has appeared in
European Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Fashion Theory, Women’s Studies, Victorian
Newsletters, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies and others.
12
Beyond Newgate: Semi-literacy vs. Artifice in the 1830s Novel
Louise Creechan
One of the predominant anxieties that the literate classes of the early nineteenth century fixated
upon was the fear that the newly-literate masses would read ‘immoral’ texts indiscriminately, such
as the Newgate Novel and the cheap, thrilling literature from the periodical presses. There is an
existing body of criticism, most notably in Patrick Brantlinger’s The Reading Lesson (1998) and
Juliet John’s ‘Twisting the Newgate Tale’ (2000), that explores the contemporary association of
semi-literates (people who are functionally literate, but unskilled and unlearned) with criminality.
The ability to read about criminal exploits, fuelled criminal exploits according to the construction of
the literate criminals of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) who all read Newgate Novels, such
as William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford
(1830).
I will focus initially on this highly critiqued trope of the criminal semi-literate, before considering
the legacy of another construction of semi-literacy that arose in the 1830s with the publication of
The Pickwick Papers (1836-7): the semi-literate cockney wit. This paper will explore this alternate
construction of semi-literacy in a move to reclaim this trope as a radical means of shattering artifice
which champions the challenging of class and intellectual hypocrisy as a moral duty. I will discuss
how Dickens and Thackeray align semi-literacy with a meta-textual critique of upper-class frivolity
and immorality in The Pickwick Papers and, the parody text, The Memoirs of Charles J.
Yellowplush (1837). While Sam Weller (of The Pickwick Papers) and Charles Yellowplush do not
explicitly cast moral judgement on their masters, their wit is a means of prompting the reader to
come to the same implied judgement and to recognise the hypocrisy of the learned men that they
serve. This alternative construction of semi-literacy is particularly compelling as it neither
demonises nor marginalises the uneducated, but instead celebrates their unique insight.
Biography
Louise is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow where she completed her
undergraduate degree in English Literature and her masters in Victorian Literature. Her PhD thesis
explores the representation of illiteracy in the Victorian novel and aims to challenge the perception
of illiteracy as a homologous experience through an engagement with Disability Studies.
13
Fiction, Pretending: Advertorials and Other Genre Crossers in Nineteenth-Century Popular
Periodicals
Maria Damkjær
In 1850, a new monthly magazine called The Household Friend ran a serial story called ‘The Happy
Family’. It is a poorly written, badly edited domestic narrative about a girl setting up a knitting
club; the first numbers are taken up with tedious lists of craft projects undertaken by each young
woman (a knitted yachting-jacket; a silk hair net; newly fashionable crochet) and mild romantic
entanglement between male and female members of the social circle. The story later veers sharply
into melodrama before disappearing completely without reaching a conclusion. Almost all the
elements of the story correspond to the magazine’s full title: The Household Friend; a Magazine of
Domestic Economy, Literature, Amusement, Instruction, Knitting, Netting, Crochet, and Fancy
Needlework. The story, so clearly a page-filler, is also an advertorial for the magazine itself. Hidden
advertising was prevalent in popular magazines certainly from the 1840s onwards, and selfreferentiality was often accompanied by a knowing wink to the reader.
The generic markers of ‘The Happy Family’ suggests how page fillers experimented with genre in
response to the spatial economies of the periodical. Other short fictions in popular magazines might
explicitly refer to the editor’s page restrictions, as happens in an 1849 story in the Home Circle.
This paper is about the strange borderland between fiction and advertising, and about the selfreferentiality, meta-textuality and genre-crossing that occur when periodicals attempt to fill their
pages. We find writers namedropping the periodical, or fictions purporting to be first-person
accounts from amateurs eager to rush into print, addressed to the editor and requesting publication.
Fiction could be page-filler, product placement and entertainment, all at once. And, I argue, crossfertilization between genres invited readers to see those genres as mutable and fluid.
Biography
Maria Damkjær has a PhD from King’s College London with a thesis on domestic time in midnineteenth-century print culture. She is currently a Carlsberg Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University
of Copenhagen. This paper is part of her larger project about the cross-fertilization between
advertising and fiction.
14
H. G. Wells, Eugen Sandow and the Future of the Human Body
Martin Danahay
Both H. G. Wells and Eugen Sandow projected a human body altered by artificial means; however,
they had diametrically opposed visions of the fate of the human body when acted upon by
technology. For H. G. Wells technology promised the transcendence of the bodily. In “The Man of
the Year Million” and in The War of the Worlds Wells predicted that the human body (as well as the
Martian body) would atrophy thanks to dependence on mechanical appendages and artificial means
of digestion. Sandow in his publications and his Institutes of Physical Culture promised exactly the
opposite; by using various patented mechanical devices and following his regimen of physical
activity, Sandow promised that his pupils’ body would grow larger, and even promised explicitly
how many inches would be gained. Both were part of a wider scientific debate on the fate of the
human body, and by extension, that of the British population that also found expression in Francis
Galton’s publications on eugenics. Despite their apparent differences, both Wells and Sandow were
committed to the application of science on the human body, and are linked by Michel Foucault’s
concept of “biopolitics,” applied at the micro level of the scientific management and modification
of the human body.
Biography
Martin Danahay is Professor of English at Brock University. He is the author of Gender at Work in
Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (Ashgate Publishing, 2005) and co-editor with
Deborah Denenholz Morse of Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian
Culture (Ashgate Publishing, 2007). He is editor of Broadview editions of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Second Edition, 2005) and H. G. Wells’ The
War of the Worlds (2003). He has published numerous articles on a variety of topics in Victorian
culture, including the working-class body in “Jekyll and Hyde,” H. G. Wells, animals and eugenics.
His most recent publication, in The Journal of Victorian Culture, is on the Transatlantic Arts and
Crafts movement.
15
Stevenson and H. G. Wells: Monomaniacs, Duality and Evolutionary Science
Linda Dryden
Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894, just a year before H. G. Wells burst onto the literary scene
with his novel of time travel and evolution, The Time Machine (1895). Wells followed up the
success of this debut novel with The Island of Dr Moreau in 1896, and a year later with The
Invisible Man (1897), establishing himself as the foremost late-nineteenth century writer of
scientific fantasies. By this time Stevenson’s posthumous reputation was being manipulated by his
wife, Fanny, and his literary friends, like Sidney Colvin, in such a way as to foreground him as a
writer of adventure stories for boys. His more serious themes, and his enduring influence on the
writers who succeeded him were thus subsumed beneath the populist image of Stevenson as a
children’s author. At the same time, other writers, including Wells and his friends, Joseph Conrad
and Stephen Crane, were consciously and vocally diminishing Stevenson’s literary achievements.
Nevertheless, the indebtedness of emergent modernists like Conrad and Ford to Stevenson has at
least begun to be acknowledged and accepted; but his influence on Wells’s scientific fantasies has
barely been recognized. To that end, this paper will trace the echoes of Stevenson and the allusions
to his works in novels like The Island of Dr Moreau and The Invisible Man. Central to these
explorations will be two novellas by Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and
The Ebb-Tide (1894), and the short story ‘Markheim’ (1884), with glances at other Stevenson
works like ‘The Beach of Falesá’ (1892). Apart from Jekyll and Hyde, Stevenson’s name is never
mentioned in the context of science fiction, yet his imagination was so mercurial and wide-ranging,
so conscious of the uncanny and the supernatural that he is an obvious, yet neglected precursor to
the scientific fantasies that gave birth to the twentieth-century genre of science fiction.
Moreover, duality in Stevenson is not confined to Jekyll and Hyde: it emerges in The Master of
Ballantrae (1889) in a startling, almost modernist form; his growing unease with the imperial
project becomes evident in his South Seas fiction, notably in ‘The Beach of Falesá’; and his
understanding and ironizing of monomaniacs infiltrates a number of his works including
‘Markheim’, Jekyll and Hyde, and The Ebb-Tide. These are themes and motifs that Wells develops
in his early science fiction novels and short stories. Effectively, Wells’s dismissal of Stevenson
from the pantheon of English literature masks a formative artistic and conceptual influence that
cannot be denied. It is the purpose of this essay to unravel the complex web of influences and
literary allusions that Wells drew upon in some of his early works that would become the
cornerstone of the genre of science fiction. What emerges from such a study is a clear recognition of
Stevenson as a major late-nineteenth-century author who played a significant role in the
inauguration of the new literary genres that emerged during the twentieth century.
Biography
Linda Dryden is Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh Napier University. She is the author
of Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson,
Wilde and Wells, and Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin de Siecle Literary Scene which
appeared in May this year. In addition, Linda has published over 40 articles and book chapters,
mainly concentrating on her primary research area of Conrad studies. Linda runs the English
Department at Edinburgh Napier and is the Director of the University’s Centre for Literature and
Writing. She originated and administers the Robert Louis Stevenson website and is co-editor of the
Journal of Stevenson Studies.
16
Popular Proofs: Using Fiction to Discuss the Artifices of Science
Jennifer Duggan
In 1865, Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote a book that changed the face of
children’s literature forever. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is often hailed as one of the first
works truly written for children, but it also drew upon another trend, one that is perhaps less
obvious: the trend of using (popular) fiction to argue for or against the plausibility of theorems
posited in academic milieus, and particularly those regarding physics and mathematics. Building
upon Spoofing Proofing: The Logical-Narratological Construction of Carroll’s Alice Books (2012),
this paper will seek to explore not only Dodgson’s use of the reductio ad absurdum proof (often
referred to as “disproving the opposite”) as a narratological frame for his Alice books in order to
explore the (im)possibility of certain mathematical arguments but will also explore the trend of
making academic arguments through fiction published both in the popular press and in novel form.
It will refer, in particular, to Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatlands and to various works published in Punch,
as well as to the Alice books. This paper hopes to explore the links drawn between scientific
theorems and fantasy in academics’ often bitter disputes about the nature of reality and the
provability of scientific theory. It will build upon Deanna K. Kreisel’s recent work, seeking to
expand her arguments regarding anxieties over the boundary between the real and the imagined in
scientific publications regarding other dimensions. This paper would fit into either the “Fakes and
Frauds” or the “Genre Boundaries” panels. Please place it at your discretion.
Works Cited
Duggan, Jennifer. Spoofing Proofing: The Logical-Narratological Construction of Carroll’s Alice
Books. MA thesis. UBC, 2012. Theses Canada. Web. 28 Jan. 2015.
Kreisel, Deanna K. “The Discreet Charm of Abstraction: Hyperspace Worlds and Victorian
Geometry.” Victorian Studies 56.3 (Spring 2014): 398–410. jStor. Web. 28 Jan. 2015.
Biography
Jennifer is an assistant professor at Høgskolen i Sør-Trøndelag, Trondheim, Norway. She comes to
Norway from Canada. Her research interests include science and technology studies, children’s and
YA fiction, Victorian fiction, and the history of science, especially the history of the neurological
sciences and mathematics.
17
Sagacious Canines and Brave Brutes: Re-discovering the Victorian Dog-Drama
Ann Featherstone
Even by the 1850s, dog dramas were regarded as old-fashioned. The novelty of a dog opening a
gate, carrying eggs in its mouth, performing the ‘seize’, even swimming across a theatrical lake in
order to rescue a drowning child, had had its day. But canine stars such as Bruin, Devilshoof and
Nelson were fondly remembered and the dramas in which they starred – The Woodman and His
Dog, The Bloodhound of Bohemia, Mungo Park – were still performed in working-class theatres.
This paper rediscovers the history of the dog-drama, the identity of the dog-actor and the dramas in
which he appeared, and addresses the tension between the authenticity and artifice of the
performance.
Biography
I took my undergraduate degree
in English and Art History with
the Open University, where I then
did a Masters in the Eighteenth
Century Novel. My PhD was
taken in the Department of Drama
and Theatre Studies at Royal
Holloway, University of London,
my research and thesis being
entitled “‘Crowded nightly’
popular entertainment outside
London during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries”.
I worked from Royal Holloway as
Assistant Editor on Nineteenth
Century Theatre for four years,
and have been working on a
major AHRC project “An
Alternative History of Victorian
Entertainment” for three years. I
contribute regularly to radio and
television.
18
The True Chronicle History of King Leir (sic)
Valerie Fehlbaum
For some, like George Bernard Shaw, King Lear is Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy; for others, like
Samuel Johnson, it is simply too shocking and too bleak. For the purposes of this conference I
thought it might be interesting to consider the authentic history of King Lear as a play and in
performance in Victorian times.
With the flourishing of theatres in general in the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s plays,
embodying so-called pre-eminent English values, again became truly popular. It is surely significant
that Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, ‘for the young reader’, met with such
success. Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines could, it was claimed, be ‘enrichers of the fancy’ and
‘strengtheners of virtue’. Moreover, they could ‘teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity’.
However, it was also the Victorians who restored King Lear, overtly so void of such qualities, to its
full tragic ending. For well over a century and a half, the play had been performed according to
Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptations, including love scenes between Edgar and Cordelia, omitting the
Fool and, most famously, providing a happy ending for both Cordelia and Lear. In 1756 David
Garrick had first made an attempt to return to Shakespeare’s version, although still with a happy
ending. Only in 1823 did Edmund Kean reinstate Shakespeare’s tragic ending, and it was not until
1838 that William Macready more-or-less restored the play completely. From the lofty heights of
the twenty-first century, we tend to consider the Victorians as maudlin and sentimental. In this
paper, I would like to examine how they could reconcile themselves to a play so apparently lacking
in the virtues they most admired?
Biography
Valerie Fehlbaum teaches at Geneva University where she specialises in the nineteenth century with
the occasional foray into Shakespeare. She has recently contributed chapters to Women in
Journalism at the Fin de Siècle: Making a Name for Herself and In Transit: Reading Women’s
Passage Through Gendered Spaces in a Century of Change, both published by Palgrave Macmillan.
19
Astounding Imposture or Vast Miracle?: Mesmerism in Popular Periodical Fiction
Claire Furlong
An 1833 piece in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, published while knowledge of mesmerism was
still, in Britain, in its infancy, described the practice as a ‘scientific wonder’. Not everyone agreed,
however: mesmerism was seen variously as an unconscionable fraud, as pioneering medical
research work, as harmless entertainment, and as a revelatory practice capable of exposing
previously unknown truths about spiritual forces and the relations between humans.
I explore the treatment of mesmerism in two mass-market publications, the Family Herald and
Reynolds’s Miscellany, which had strong - and radically different - editorial approaches to the
subject. The Herald, founded and edited by millennial theologian James ‘Shepherd’ Smith,
repeatedly expressed its faith in the worth of mesmerism, believing it to reveal spiritual truths about
humanity and expose the fallacy of materialist views of human life. Reynolds’s, meanwhile,
reported upon it as a sham from start to finish, a mere trick by fraudsters to prey on the gullible.
While non-fiction pieces in both periodicals seek certainties of explanation, however, their fiction
suggests multiple, inconclusive ways of viewing mesmeric phenomena, undermining the idea that
definitive explanations and claims to knowledge can be relied upon.
“The Mysterious Phial” a Reynolds’s story of 1850, tells the tale of a disastrous mesmeric
procedure, the effects of which may be attributed to mysterious spiritual forces, medical procedures,
the mental state of the practitioner or the faith of the subject. The story offers no authoritative
source of knowledge on which the reader may rely; offering and undermining its own explanations
at every turn, it suggests simultaneous belief and scepticism in mesmerism. “Illumination; Or, the
Sleep-Walker”, a short series published in the Herald, draws upon the spiritual language employed
elsewhere in the periodical, but its representation of a proactive female subject raises questions
about the basis of mesmeric phenomena.
Biography
Claire Furlong is a PhD student at the University of Exeter. Her thesis, “Bodies of Knowledge:
Science, Medicine and Authority in Popular Periodicals 1832-1850” examines science in
Reynolds’s Miscellany, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and the Family Herald. She also teaches an
undergraduate Victorian literature course, and previously worked as a solicitor.
20
An Authentic Challenge? Towards the Inclusion of the Penny Bloods in Course Syllabuses
Anna Gasperini
Recently, the academic world rediscovered the Victorian Penny Bloods and Penny Dreadfuls. These
gory, swashbuckling serials from the 1800s are slowly but steadily negotiating their role as an
authentic subject for academic research; however, their inclusion in course syllabuses seems to be
still a rather exceptional event. Certainly the Bloods and Dreadfuls present a series of challenges to
the seminar or course leader: they are bulky, tough readings, and their circulation is not wide.
Moreover, the amount of scholarship produced on them is relatively small and scattered, compared
to that produced on other popular fiction. Finally, the prejudices still existing about this literature
make it appear a risky choice for a course topic.
Yet, in front of the development of the academic debate around cheap serialized Victorian fiction,
and of the steady growth of the amount of scholarship produced on it, it is important that we start
reflecting over strategies for including it in course syllabuses.
Using the two Penny Bloods The String of Pearls and The Mysteries of London as case study, this
paper aims to present a plan for including cheap serialized fiction in course syllabuses, and open a
discussion on how this could be done. It will outline potential strategies, focusing on what aspects
of this type of fiction can be relevant to a course syllabus and what techniques can be used in terms
of theory, methodology, and comparison with related authors. In so doing, the ultimate goal of the
paper will be that of examining what benefits would come to both students and to the research in the
field from teaching this branch of Victorian literature in courses.
Biography
Anna Gasperini is a third year PhD candidate at the National University of Ireland, Galway where
she researches the relationship between the Victorian Penny Bloods and Medicine. Previous to
starting her research in Ireland, she conducted her studies at MA level in Italy (Ca’ Foscari
University of Venice) and France (Université Paris-Diderot, Paris VII). Her research interests cover
Victorian cheap serialized fiction, the Victorian Gothic, and the relationship between Victorian
literature and Medicine. She presented at several conferences in Italy and in the UK, including the
2013 NAVSA-BAVS-AVSA conference in Venice, and the 5th and 6th annual conferences of the
VPFA. Her first article, Anatomy of the Demons – The Demoniac Body Dealers of the Penny
Bloods, is forthcoming in the 2015 Spring-Summer issue of the Journal of Supernatural Studies.
She has also recently collaborated as a reviewer with the Journal of European Popular Culture.
21
Styles of Populism in Victorian Popular Fiction in the Long Nineteenth Century
David Glover
The history of Victorian popular fiction currently stands at a crossroad. On one side an old and
well-worn signpost points toward a long path from misty melodramatic origins that finally opens
out into a clear view of the modern genre system as we know it today. By contrast, in recent years a
new and less familiar route has been charted through which Franco Moretti seems to have turned
the established view on its head, replacing it with an evolutionary model in which clearly
identifiable genres rise and fall before arriving at the inchoate terrain occupied by contemporary
bestsellers. This antinomy raises the most basic questions about genre boundaries and cultural
history with a fresh sense of urgency. What was Victorian popular fiction? In what ways did it
change between Queen Victoria’s coronation and the fin-de-siècle? And what was the nature of its
popularity? In revisiting these “problem-spaces” this lecture begins with the revival of critical
interest in the writings of George W. M. Reynolds, before moving on to consider other success
stories such as those of Margaret Harkness and the rather neglected novelist M.P. Shiel. My aim
will be not only to explore the forms of socio-political address that these authors employed and the
part played by their work in the expansion of the Victorian fiction market, but also to relate their
texts to the complex and protean history of populism in the long nineteenth century (including
popular radicalism and popular liberalism). Indeed, I will argue that it is through these “visions of
the people” – to draw upon historian Patrick Joyce’s helpful phrase connecting what “the people”
see with how they in turn are seen – that key ideas about popular justice, collective energy, and
recalcitrance in the face of conspiratorial power were imagined and sustained. Notions like these lay
at the heart of Victorian popular narratives and were responsible for much of their public appeal.
Biography
David Glover is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton. His most recent
book is Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England: A Cultural History of the
1905 Aliens Act and, with Scott McCracken he has co-edited The Cambridge Companion to
Popular Fiction (both published by Cambridge University Press in 2012). Other publications
include Genders (co-written with Cora Kaplan, brought out by Routledge in 2000 and in a revised
second edition in 2009) and Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of
Popular Fiction (from Duke University Press, 1996). He is a team member of the Raphael Samuel
History Centre and, at Southampton, a Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish and
non-Jewish Relations. Since 1996 he has been a member of the Editorial Board of new formations:
a journal of culture/theory/politics and was its editor from 1996 to 2000 and co-editor (with Scott
McCracken) from 2004 to 2008.
22
Artful Dodgers: Poverty, Performance and Physical Disability in Victorian London
Helen Goodman
E. P. Thompson’s analysis of the years leading to the Chartist riots notes the rise of ‘dodgers’ who
feigned disability or misfortune to beg money from sympathetic Londoners. By the 1840s many of
the tricks of impostors were known. As Thompson observes, ‘unless he had the knowledge of
humanity or Dickens or Mayhew, the middle-class man saw in every open palm the evidence of
idleness and deceit… the half-naked man in the snowstorm might be working the “shivering
dodge”… the child sobbing in the gutter over a package of spilt tea and a tale of lost change might
be schooled in the dodge by her mother.’ Dickens famously creates a fictional world of such
(literally ‘Artful’) ‘dodging’ in Oliver Twist, with Fagin taking on a deceitful surrogate maternal
role.
The role of feigned adult disability, however, has received comparatively little critical attention.
Such fraudulent performative practices diverted funds away from those considered the genuine or
‘deserving’ poor, and discouraged increasingly cynical potential donors. This paper discusses the
emergence of uncomfortably inauthentic figures in the New Poor Law period who threatened to
desensitise genuine sympathy and fostered scepticism of philanthropic charity.
Contradictory to popular conceptions of early and mid-nineteenth century masculinities, there is
evidence of men who, far from being too proud or ashamed to reveal their disfigurement in public,
deliberately created and drew attention to it, with others even seeking profit from its imitation. Silas
Wegg in Our Mutual Friend uses his genuine disability of only having one leg to bolster his
fraudulent appeal as a scholar to Boffin. Analysing social investigation by Mayhew and
representations in the popular press (including Dickens’s fiction), this paper highlights the epidemic
of inauthentic disability on the streets of Victorian London and its persistence in perceptions of
fraudulent tax dodgers and disability fraud today.
Biography
Helen Goodman is in the final stages of completing her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of
London, on ‘Mad men: insanity, masculinities and the emotions in Victorian literature and culture.’
She has recently been published on subjects including nineteenth-century adventure narratives,
masculinity, disability, and insanity in London’s lunatic asylums.
23
“Always The Same, Like Horniman’s Tea”: Artifice and Authenticity in Grant Allen’s An
African Millionaire
Silvia Granata
My paper will explore representations of authenticity and artifice in Grant Allen’s An African
Millionaire (1896-97), a series of short stories that focus on the antagonism between a dishonest
millionaire and a master of disguise who repeatedly cheats him. Artifice is obviously prominent in
the multiple disguises that Colonel Clay and his female accomplice adopt in order to trick the
millionaire, but it also pervades the stories in less conspicuous ways: indeed, all the characters are
engaged in some kind of performance or ‘undercover’ activity, from the shady businessproceedings of the millionaire himself, to his secretary’s attempts at bribery, to the little ‘beauty
secrets’ of their wives. Thus, duplicity does not only characterise the world of business and finance,
but seems to permeate society as a whole.
Furthermore, not only people, but also objects participate in this universal camouflage: on the one
hand, the cons performed by Clay often exploit the ambiguity between real and false objects; on the
other hand, there is a strong emphasis on the material items used by Clay to go undercover, which
are repeatedly discussed and fantasised upon by other characters, so that even real body-parts are
suspected of being fake. In a telling remark, the millionaire observes that he wishes Colonel Clay
“were always the same, like Horniman’s tea or a good brand of whisky”, referring to the popular
advertisements of a brand who claimed to be “pure” and “always good alike”. This highlights a
widespread difficulty in assessing the authenticity of both people and things, a difficulty further
complicated by the continuous oscillation between suspicion and desire, which underlies all the
tales and challenges, in an ironic way, the expectations of characters and readers alike.
Biography
Silvia Granata obtained an MA at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York, in
2004. In 2007 she completed her PHD in English Literature. She works as a researcher at the
University of Pavia. She is currently working on a book-project on representations of material
culture in late-Victorian detective fiction.
24
The Mesmerizing Diary: Unveiling Literary Deception in The Prestige by C. Priest
Giuseppina di Gregorio
The plot of The Prestige revolves around the theme of deception, which is analysed through
different perspectives, as theatre’s stages and written memories, enhancing a contrast between
appearance and reality, or it would be more appropriate to say, between expectations and reality.
The pivotal element of misdirection is to question assumptions, but according to Christopher Priest,
all fiction misdirects the reader, or it can do. You hear thriller writers talking about it. What they
mean is laying false clues, and all that. But when a magician uses ‘misdirection’ he’s up to
something more subtle and interesting. A magician plays on the audience’s own assumptions so
they misdirect themselves.
The main characters of this novel are two Victorian magicians who arrange mis-en-scènes in order
to engage characters (and readers too) in a game of mirrors, where boundaries between public and
private spheres are reinforced and blurred at the same time, providing a deep psychological insight
of Victorian “double-Standard” from a postmodern point of view.
Although considered as one of the greatest science fiction writers, Cristopher Priest’s novel defies
any attempt at formal classification, since it displays several elements belonging to several genres,
as Neo-Victorian fiction. The aim of this paper is to investigate the “devices” used by the writer to
recreate mesmerizing techniques of fin de siècle magicians: different layers of narration with a
polyphony of narrators, in order to challenge diaries’ authenticity and thus identities. Following a
detection path to unmask disguises and pseudonyms, this research will question the features of NeoVictorian trace and the implications of Post-modern ventriloquism.
Biography
Dr Giuseppina Di Gregorio is an English Lecturer at the University of Catania and the University of
Enna “Kore”. She holds a Ph D in English and Anglo-American Studies at the University of
Catania, Italy, in 2012, with a thesis about Neo-Victorian novels. She wrote a book entitled State of
Soul – L’immaginario di D. H. Lawrence in The Study of Thomas Hardy. Her research interests
include Victorian and Neo-Victorian studies, translation studies, adaptation studies and English for
Specific Purposes.
25
Love, Murder and a Vampire: Mesmerism and Late-Victorian Popular Fiction
Laura Habbe
The practice of mesmerism, today mostly seen as pseudoscience, became a fashionable theme for
popular fiction in the 1890s. After the medical establishment had mostly dismissed mesmerism as
scientifically unsound in the middle of the century, it found new credit among scientists towards the
end of the nineteenth century, particularly due to Charcot’s success at the Salpêtrière. In turn, this
sparked the imagination of many popular authors who used the tensions arising between fraudulent
performance and authentic practice in order to create horrific plotlines. Their protagonists often
doubt the reality of mesmerism and are then trapped in a nightmare of mesmeric trance in which
they are forced to give sexual favours or become criminals. To illustrate this, this paper discusses
the use of mesmerism as powerful and dangerous practice in the popular fiction of Doyle, Hocking
and James MacLaren Cobban. Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Hocking both demonstrate how
dangerous it can be to see mesmeric performances as light-hearted entertainment – an attitude that
leads to total loss of will in their protagonists. Doyle’s The Parasite (1894), which demonstrates the
limits of scientific investigation, and Hocking’s Weapons of Mystery (1890), which offers religious
faith as edifying solution against evil influences, pursue different paths but both employ mesmerism
in a similar way. Cobban, for his part, presents mesmerism as a medical science in Master of his
Fate (1890) and offers his views on professional duty. He creates a vampiric mesmerist who abuses
his scientific training and drains his victims of their life force. The British Medical Journal from
September 20, 1890, aptly remarks, “the rising Wilkie Collinses cannot do better than plunge boldly
into (the records of the Salpêtrière school of literature).” As this paper explores, mesmerism as a
plot device can cover a whole spectrum of possibilities.
Biography
I hold an M.A. Honours degree in English and Latin (St Andrews) and an M.Phil in Comparative
Literature from TCD. Currently, I am in the final year of my PhD at the School of English, TCD.
My research explores the figure of the mad scientist in late-Victorian fiction.
26
Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters, The Law of the Threshold, and the Performance
of Imperial Femininity
Fayeza Hasanat
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler has observed that “the substantive effect of gender is
performatively produced and compelled to the regulatory practices of gender coherence” (34).
According to her, gender, which relies on “Principles of performance,” does not define
performaitivity as “a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its
naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal
duration” (XV). Using Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Water (1896) and The Law of the
Threshold (1924) as primary texts, this paper aims at examining the rituals of performativity in
terms of imperial promises and perils of female agency. On the Face of the Waters, a novel on the
Indian Mutiny of 1857, reconfigures the female agency through re-enactment of the Victorian
ideology of Angel in the house, the Ideal home, and the superiority of English woman as the
epitome of imperial political institution. The Law of the Threshold deals with inter-racial
relationship and sexual tension that deepen with ritualistic performances of the Kali cult. The
Western-educated Indian heroine of the book, even though she appears to be an inevitable threat for
both the Indian and English community as she literally and figuratively performs the role of Kali, is
nothing but a tool that helps bring forth the promises of female agency epitomized through her
Western counterpart. In the process of such reconfiguration, Steel brings the self-effacing Angel of
the first novel and the self-conscious practical woman of The Law of the Threshold face to face with
their passive-aggressive and exceedingly emotional Indian Other, only to re-establish the powerful
effect of imperial femininity.
Biography
Fayeza Hasanat is a Lecturer at the English Department of the University of Central Florida, U.S.A.
Her research interest is in gender and religion in British India, with special emphasis on the Muslim
Women writers of the British Empire. She has published a book, a few articles and short fictions.
27
28
‘M. E. Braddon’s Sensationally Criminal Short Fiction’
Janine Hatter
Sensation fiction is a composite genre, made up of Realism, detective fiction, melodrama and the
Gothic. Braddon was an adept writer of all of these genres across her wide ranging and long
spanning careers as a novelist, short story writers, playwright and magazine editor. This paper
focuses specifically on her crime short fiction to illustrate the generic and gender challenges she
brought to the genre even before its traditions were cemented. For instance, Braddon depicts both
amateur and professional detectives within her short fiction, ranging from police men and retired
detectives, to the clergy and concerned family members. This pervasive presence of detective
figures offers Braddon scope to penetrate the deepest and darkest corners of all classes of society
and gives her female characters agency to confront and redefine their limited social spheres.
Furthermore, the term crime fiction is used specifically, rather than detective fiction, because not all
of Braddon’s tales of murder, theft, blackmail, kidnap, forgery and general mystery have a
designated detective figure. One of her most radical challenges to the genre is leaving a tale
unresolved for the characters. In ‘Wild Justice’ (1896) the episodic, evidence-based narrative
reflects contemporary police practice to provide clues to the reader for the disappearance of Harold,
while leaving the characters completely unaware that a crime has been committed; Braddon depicts
the reality of crime in that not all cases are resolved with a neat conclusion. Overall, this paper
discusses examples of Braddon’s crime short fiction to illustrate her reinvigoration of this newly
established genre.
Biography
Dr Janine Hatter is an ECR who gained her doctorate from the University of Hull. Her research
interests centre on nineteenth-century literature, art and culture, with particular emphasis on popular
fiction. She has published material on Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s short fiction in St John’s
Humanities Review and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, as well as on her wider research
interests of twenty and twenty-first century Science Fiction and the Gothic for Supernatural Studies.
As well as being Femspec’s journal, peer review and set-up co-ordinator, Janine is co-founder of
the ‘Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association’ and is Conference Organiser and Membership Secretary
for
the
Victorian
Popular
Fiction
Association.
29
“Affectionately Inscribed”: The Plagiarism of Catherine Anne Hubback née Austen
Jacquelyn Hayek
Overshadowed by her aunt Jane Austen, mid-Victorian popular writer Catherine Anne Hubback has
been neglected by many critics. At the start of her writing career, members of her own family
accused her of plagiarizing Austen’s fragment “The Watsons” in her first novel The Younger Sister
(1850). Critics such as Kathleen James-Cavan, Alice Villaseñor and Marina Cano-Lopez have
focused on this aspect of the novel and have been consequently distracted from Hubback’s
adaptations, divergences and hybridizations of Austen’s text. This essay will demonstrate how
Hubback’s novel is better understood as an appropriation of Austen’s text, reworking borrowed
elements to produce a unique and authentic text in the Victorian mode.
In her incomplete story “The Watsons,” Jane Austen created a family drama in the home of a
country clergyman centring on an extraordinary and unmarried daughter. Her presentation of issues
regarding money, marriage and class is consistent with her other Regency stories. Hubback,
meanwhile, makes no attempt to re-present Austen’s social milieu. She approaches issues of money
and class with a consciousness influenced by the mid-nineteenth century middle class experience.
Even the novel’s love stories and matters of marriage reflect Victorian social fomentation around
the New Woman, contemplating legislation like the Reform and Married Woman’s Property Acts.
While engaging the same overarching themes of money, marriage, and class as Austen, Hubback
addresses them from a specifically Victorian perspective.
In her dedication, Hubback acknowledges how Jane Austen’s writing as a body inspired her. This
brief homage indicates the role Austen’s writing plays in Hubback’s book. Nevertheless, Hubback’s
work, particularly volume two, reflects in setting, conflict dynamics, characters and characterization
her particular cultural context.
Biography
Jacquelyn C. Hayek is a graduate teaching assistant currently pursuing a doctoral degree and
specializing in Victorian and trans-Atlantic nineteenth-century literature at Middle Tennessee State
University in Murfreesboro. Her particular interests include women writers, gender representation
and social issues, and the novel as an emerging popular genre.
30
31
Authenticity and Artifice: Femininity, Art and Aestheticism in Kathleen Mannington
Caffyn’s A Yellow Aster
Naomi Hetherington
Caffyn’s novel A Yellow Aster (1894) was associated with the New Woman phenomenon on
account of the heroine Gwen Waring’s acceptance of a proposal of marriage as an experiment and
her subsequent disgust at the physical relations which marriage entails. Notorious in its own day for
its frank treatment of sexual relations, the novel has received little attention in literary studies of the
New Woman due to its conservative ending in which Gwen realises her love for husband through
the experience of motherhood. Failing to challenge patriarchal power relations, it does not fit
comfortably into dominant conceptions of New Woman fiction as an overtly political genre. This
paper offers a new reading of A Yellow Aster as an aestheticist novel. As Talia Schaffer has shown,
aestheticism allowed women to represent scandalous subject matters by pioneering stylistic
innovations. Formally experimental, they did not necessarily challenge conservative ideologies.
Caffyn’s representation of femininity through the visual aesthetics of painting exposes the artificial
construction of womanhood even as it is used to figure an essential femininity rooted in biological
difference. Symbolised by the hothouse flower of the novel’s title, Gwen is the artificial product of
modernity. She is depicted as the Watteau woman bathed in the yellow light of the drawing room.
Conveying her frigidity and inaccessibility, this is contrasted with a painting of her on her wedding
day depicting her as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty. An iconic image of femininity, it embodies of a set of
contradictions central to nineteenth-century constructions of womanhood in the relation of tangible,
material surface to mysterious, inaccessible depths. Gwen’s transformation into the woman of the
painting at the end of novel signals her discovery of her innate femininity. Yet constructed in the
novel as an authentic image of womanhood, it reduces its essence to a mere painted surface.
Biography
Dr Naomi Hetherington is University Tutor in English and Humanities in the Department of
Lifelong Learning, University of Sheffield. She has co-edited a collection of essays on Jewish New
Woman writer Amy Levy (Ohio UP, 2010), and is currently completing a monograph on the figure
of the freethinking New Woman.
32
‘A Picture Of Such Extraordinary Merit That No-One Could Understand It’: Forgery, Value
and the Literary Mass Market in G.W.M Reynolds’s Mysteries of London
Jessica Hindes
As Ian Haywood has observed, forgeries prompt consideration of the ways in which a ‘culture
imbues a work of art with authority and significance’. Is artistic value purely aesthetic or does it
reside somewhere more complicated and intangible – in history, or pedigree, or a certain exalted
mode of expression?
In his penny serial The Mysteries of London, published weekly between 1844 and 1856, the
journalist and novelist G.W.M. Reynolds uses the trope of the forger and his gullible customer in
order to explore these questions: which took on a new pertinence in the light of the emerging mass
market of the early nineteenth century. This paper examines two scenes from Reynolds’s work, one
of which concerns a gallery supplying forged Old Master paintings and the other of which describes
the sale of a fraudulent Egyptian mummy. I argue that in both instances, Reynolds uses the image of
the forgery to interrogate existing criteria of artistic value, exposing their dependence on a model of
cultural expertise that was not only false (his wealthy consumers are easily deluded) but which was
carefully calculated to exclude or devalue the texts and consumers of the new mass market.
Depicting elite consumers as egoistic mis-readers, Reynolds makes the case for an alternative
notion of art, which values accessibility and which creates a cultural space for the working-class
readers who bought and enjoyed his serial. As the last part of my paper will argue, this is a
suggestion that acquires additional significance given the reception history of Reynolds’s work;
which (like so many mass cultural texts) was long relegated to obscurity by the same elitist cultural
standards that its author set out to interrogate.
Biography:
Jessica Hindes recently completed a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London on G.W.M.
Reynolds’s Mysteries series and the literary mass market. She has been teaching this year at her
home institution and at weekends she sometimes volunteers as a tour guide at North London’s
Highgate Cemetery. This will be her third time presenting at VPFA.
33
Fake, Forgery or Fulfillment: Perception of Authenticity in Completions of Edwin Drood
Camilla Ulleland Hoel
When Charles Dickens died in 1870, he left behind the half-finished serial novel The Mystery of
Edwin Drood, of which only three out of a planned twelve installments had been published, and
another three written. Following Dickens’ death, a series of completions have been published, the
reactions to which demonstrate both a continuity and a change in the perception of authenticity.
This paper will look at the strategies used by early completion-writers in order to overcome the
completions’ perceived lack of authenticity, and the reactions to these efforts in the press. The paper
will focus on two completions: First, T. P. James’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood Complete. Part the
Second of the Mystery of Edwin Drood. By the Spirit-Pen of Charles Dickens, Through a Medium, a
spiritualist completion from 1874, the reactions to which depend on whether the claim to authorial
authority is accepted or rejected. Second, Gillan Vase’ A Great Mystery Solved. Being a Sequel to
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, first published in 1887 in three volumes, and then republished in
1914, severely shortened. It makes no claim to have been written by Dickens.
This paper will analyse the strategies used by these completions and look at the changing reactions
to their claim to authenticity. It will demonstrate continuity in images used in criticism of the
completions, but with a particular attention to how the claim to authorial authority, whether
accepted or rejected, affects these reactions. It will also show a movement away from a focus on
style to a focus on plot as what determines the perception of authenticity around the turn of the
century. This will be tied to the extensive development of Droodian speculation as a phenomenon
between 1905 and 1914.
Biography
Camilla Ulleland Hoel has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh, in which
she analysed unfinished Victorian serial novels. The primary focus was on completions of and
speculations about Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood. She currently teaches English
at the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy.
34
Republication, Rewriting, and Recycling – Textual Changes and the Literary Identities of
Ellen Wood
Chloé Holland
Throughout her successful career, Ellen Wood constantly reused, recycled, and republished her own
material. Famous for her matronly sobriquet, ‘Mrs Henry Wood’, considered the conservative,
moral, pious voice of sensation fiction, Ellen Wood often reused previously-published material to
maintain her furious rate of literary output. This paper will investigate significant changes made to
the republished texts, from their original publication under semi-anonymous bylines in 1850s
periodicals, to their rewritten forms under the ‘Mrs Henry Wood’ brand.
While keen to reuse previously published texts for which she received little, or no, payment as an
anonymous writer, Wood often altered the recycled stories to ensure they conformed to the ‘Mrs
Henry Wood’ identity constructed after the exponential success of East Lynne (1861). Famous for
mixing a moralising, pious narrator with sensational content, the textual changes ensured that
Wood’s brand remained intact, despite reusing the more sensational anonymous stories. While
referencing significant changes made during East Lynne’s transition from serialised form to tripledecker novel, this paper will also discuss the various ‘reprinted’, yet slightly altered, stories featured
in Wood’s magazine, the Argosy. While scholars have previously recognised Wood’s extension of
the short stories to novel form, I will also pay close attention to the understudied A House of
Halliwell (1890), which was republished posthumously in the Argosy as a serialised novel after
original publication as short stories in Bentley’s Miscellany (1856).
This research forms part of my thesis, which examines the relationship between Wood’s use of
professional identities and her sustained popularity in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace.
Wood’s recycling, and altering, of her own material is a vital aspect in my research, as I argue that
the textual changes made to her stories mark the alterations to her personas and outline the
construction, and maintenance, of her literary identities.
Biography
After completing my MA at Chester, I began my PhD at Liverpool John Moores University in
September 2014. Having studied sensation fiction throughout my academic career, my thesis is
concerned with the relationship between the use of professional identities and Ellen Wood’s
prolonged success in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace.
35
Braddon, the Gothic and Quackery
Helena Ifill
Mary Elizabeth Braddon is best known for her sensation novels of the 1860s, but unlike her fellow
sensation authors, Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins, she did not extensively draw on contemporary
medical theories or controversies, nor (with the exception of The Doctor’s Wife, 1864) did she tend
to foreground physicians, medical knowledge or illness to the same extent as they did. However,
Braddon drew on many different forms and genres throughout her long career, and two short Gothic
tales, ‘Dr. Carrick’ (All the Year Round, 1878) and ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ (Strand, 1896), feature
disreputable physicians who dabble in pseudoscientific and experimental practices (mesmerism and
blood transfusions respectively) for financial gain. In each case the doctor is initially associated
with quackery, but the extent to which he actually is a quack, and the meaning of the word is
brought into question in both stories. This paper reads Braddon’s two stories alongside
contemporaneous periodical literature which foregrounds a pervading cultural uncertainty about
medical men and the trust which is necessarily placed in them.
In both stories Braddon introduces a sense of uncertainty by opening up narrative possibilities
which would be picked up on by readers who were aware of the conventions of the Gothic genre
(including the tropes of the haunted house, the Radcliffean heroine, the ancestral curse, and the
vampire), or who were familiar with Braddon’s oeuvre, only to shut them down again. There are no
supernatural events in these stories; even mesmerism (potentially an opportunity for spectacular
psychic displays) is mainly used to induce a trance that will give a patient a good night’s sleep.
Inspired by Tzvetan Todorov’s conception of the Fantastic, I argue that Braddon removes doubt
about potentially supernatural elements in her stories, only to leave doubt about the efficacy of the
medical procedures that are undertaken. Braddon self-consciously plays with generic conventions
and reader expectations as part of her strategy to cast doubt upon experimental medicine, and to
warn against blind trust in the mainstream medical profession.
Biography
Helena Ifill teaches English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include
sensation fiction, the Victorian popular press, (pseudo)science writing and the Gothic. She is the codirector of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Sheffield and co-organiser for the VPFA
annual conference.
36
‘British Zolaism’? The Authenticity of Female Experience in 1890s Slum Fiction
Jane Jordan
This paper examines the literary legacy of W.T.Stead’s ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’,
in particular the staged abduction of Eliza Armstrong, written up as ‘A Child of Thirteen Bought for
£5’, and traces the relationship between the Pall Mall Gazette narratives of seduction and the
emerging genre of British slum fiction, or ‘New Realism’, which frequently positioned a sexualised
working class young woman at its core. Stead’s subsequent criminal prosecution at the Old Bailey
(he was charged with taking the 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong from her parents’ home in a
Marylebone slum without their permission) revealed that his published account of Eliza’s seduction
was itself a ‘slum fiction’ and, further, that Stead’s understanding of working class sexual morality
was far off the mark. Stead’s investigative journalism undoubtedly influenced the new generation of
British Zolas―Morrison’s ‘Lizerunt’ (1894) and Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (1897). Yet once
again the authenticity of working class female experience, in particular female sexuality, is brought
into question. Following the work of Roger Henkle, I wish to examine why fictionalised slum
heroines are ‘predestined to sordid trouble’―whether this is due to moral censorship, to plain
ignorance, or the unshakable convention of the seduction narrative.
Biography
Dr Jane Jordan is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Kingston University where she
teaches Victorian Literature; she co-founded the Victorian Popular Fiction Association in 2009, and
has published widely on the Victorian popular novelist Ouida. Jane co-edited Ouida and Victorian
Popular Culture with Andrew King (Ashgate, 2013); more recently she has traced the relationship
between Ouida’s anti-censorship campaign and that of George Moore―in George Moore: Influence
and Collaboration, ed. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (University of Delaware Press, 2014).
Jane’s current research project re-examines W.T.Stead’s notorious exposé of the organised trade in
child prostitution published in the Pall Mall Gazette, July 1885.
37
A Fully Qualified Quack, or the Trouble with Identifying Legitimate Doctors: ‘Mr Percy and
the Prophet’, Household Words and All the Year Round
Jennifer Diann Jones
The opening chapter of Wilkie Collins’s ‘Mr Percy and the Prophet’ is entitled ‘The Quack’; in this
chapter we meet Dr Lagarde and the narrator assures us he is ‘duly qualified in England as well as
his own country to bear the title’ (2) before he goes on to describe how the doctor’s mother puts
him into a mesmeric trance so he can attempt to foretell future events for his visitors. Though the
subject is not always treated as explicitly as in Collins’s story, the blurring of lines between
quackery (which is often though not always associated with the occult) and legitimate medicine
appear frequently in the pages of Dickens’s journals. In this paper I will read the treatment of this
confusion in ‘Mr Percy and the Prophet’ in the wider context of the journals and their engagement
in debates regarding medical reform in the mid to late nineteenth century. Much of this debate
centred on the problem of distinguishing between qualified and unqualified doctors and while the
Medical Reform Act passed in 1860 attempted to clarify this point for both the profession and the
public through the advent of the Medical Register, texts like Collins’s in which the practitioner
appears to be a fully qualified quack reveal that the underlying anxiety regarding medical
legitimacy persisted for decades after the passage of the first Reform bill.
Works Cited
Collins, Wilkie. ‘Percy and the Prophet’: Ed. Charles Dickens. All the Year Round (1877): 1–30.
Biography
Dr Jennifer Diann Jones is currently a lecturer in English at the University of Portsmouth. Her
research interests include nineteenth-century literature, culture, and medicine; narrative theory; and
aesthetic theory. She is currently completing work on the manuscript for Unspeakable Feelings:
The Function of Voice, Music, and Silence in the Novels of George Eliot and working on her second
manuscript, Insensibility: (Mis)representations of Chloroform in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals .
38
Brain Fever – Diagnosing a Change in Victorian Popular Fiction
Emma Kareno
Brain fever, a malady associated with great emotional upheaval and mental shock, was frequently
used by sensation novelists to create narrative suspense and drama. The aim of this paper is to show
how brain fever serves significantly different purposes in the two novels, Driven Home (1886) and
The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery (1889), by Richard Arkwright (1835-1918). It will argue that this
difference indicates an important development in Victorian popular fiction away from melodramatic
sensation fiction with supernatural elements towards a modern detective story that takes the form of
an intellectual puzzle.
In Driven Home, a traumatic experience by the hero triggers brain fever which causes amnesia. He
is driven to unravel a mystery and pursue a sensational villain. While the hero experiences
apparently inexplicable, terrifying supernatural events, the reader can link these to the original
cause of brain fever.
In The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery, a murder mystery hinges on the love story of a housemaid and
is solved by an aristocratic female detective accompanied by her husband as a narrator. Here, brain
fever allows the narrative to hold back important information while time is running out and an
innocent man is facing the gallows. Also, the female detective must show great ingenuity in
extracting information from the victim of brain fever.
Brain fever, in these two novels has a clear impact on the experience of the reader. In Driven Home
it provides a framework for a series of supernatural events and revelations which take us through a
sensational story of a family tragedy. In The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery it hides a critical piece of
a jigsaw puzzle that allows us to solve the murder mystery. In one novel brain fever provides a
thrilling experience, in the other it creates an intellectual challenge.
Biography
Dr Emma Kareno has an M.A. from University of Tampere, Finland and a Ph.D. from Stirling
University. She wrote her doctoral thesis on Victorian detective fiction. She is now a self-published
writer and translator. She blogs on sensation fiction at perilsofsensation.blogspot.com/ and on
Nordic crime fiction at palmuandcompany.blogspot.com/.
39
Hothouse Flowers and Landscape Parks: Braddon and Botanical Artifice
Jo Knowles
This paper would examine Braddon’s use of representations of the garden and in particular her
references to shifting fashions in landscaping as indicative of social change and of character
dynamics shaped by those changes. While there has been significant interest in the role of the house
in Braddon’s fiction, less attention has been paid to her depictions of the space immediately outside
her country houses and other dwellings. Hassan’s reading of The Doctor’s Wife characterises
Braddon’s use of the garden as ‘a location of history, and as a space of transition’ (2005, p.68); if
we look beyond this specific novel, an extensive use of garden imagery as both symbolic presence
and social indicator can be uncovered in Braddon’s novels. In several of Braddon’s 1870s novels
serialised in Belgravia, she represents the transition away from landscaped gardens to a range of
blooms as an aspect of botanic trends: as Morgan and Richards document, ‘the wealth of material
available had ignited a national passion for roses, chrysanthemums, dahlias, rhododendrons and
bedding plants, and signalled the inevitable demise of the landscape park’ (1990, p.20). Yet the
landscape park represents only one type of botanic artifice which gives way to another in Braddon’s
representation of the Arden hothouses and the ‘military men, who wore hothouse flowers in their
buttonholes’ in The Lovels of Arden (1872). This paper aims to trace the competing types of
botanical artifice and authenticity used as reference points in Braddon’s fictions of the 1870s and
beyond.
Biography
Joanne Knowles is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture, Communication at Liverpool John Moores
University. Her doctoral research at Liverpool University was on Henry James and led to an
enduring interest in matters of literary status, popularity, taste and aesthetic judgement in
nineteenth-century writing and culture. She has published on M. E Braddon, gender and national
cultures in the collection New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Rhodopi, 2012) and her
nineteenth-century research interests include the work of Braddon, James, and Mary Kingsley.
40
‘High-brow’ George Eliot and ‘Popular’ Fanny Lewald: ‘Separateness and Communication’,
the Anxiety of Influence, or Differences without Contact?
Julia Kuehn
When George Eliot and George Henry Lewes travelled to Berlin in July 1854 and met the writer
couple Fanny Lewald and Adolf Stahr, Marian’s interest pertained not so much to aesthetics but to
the novelists’ personal relationship: the Stahr-Lewald couple lived, like Eliot and Lewes, in a quasimarriage which would only be legitimised after nine years and Adolf’s divorce. Lewes and Eliot
would return to Berlin in 1870, again to also visit the Lewald-Stahr couple, but the relationship
would never be a close one between Fanny and Marian, despite knowledge of each other’s works.
There really should have been more scrutiny of each other’s works, though. Had the two women
done so, they would have found many commonalities, beginning with the attack on the
sentimentalism of other female writers, via the view that literature had a didactic purpose and
should be realist, to a decidedly pro- and proto-feminist stance. And if we look deeper – which
neither Eliot nor Lewald did – both also had a particular interest in the philosophies of Feuerbach
and Spinoza.
There are a number of differences though, too. We have always struggled to find a label for Eliot’s
readership: Queenie Leavis says in Fiction and the Reading Public that Eliot was the last Victorian
author to be read by a homogenous readership, before the separation into a ‘high’ and a ‘popular’
camp. Lewald was clearly seen as a popular writer in Germany. And yet they write about the same
topics in the same modality! Clearly, we need to dig deeper here, for the purposes of understanding
‘the (Victorian) popular’ and women’s place – albeit across the Channel – in it.
This paper is the first chapter of a larger book project that compares and contrasts German and
British nineteenth-century realism in theory and in selected novels. This paper on Eliot and Lewald
is only a very first tentative step to start looking at labels and begin an enquiry into whether the
novel in Germany and in Britain developed parallel to each other, in contradistinction and through
an anxiety of influence or, in Daniel Deronda’s words, in ‘separateness and communication’.
Biography
Julia Kuehn is Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong where she teaches
courses on nineteenth-century literature and culture. She has published widely on women’s, popular
and Empire fiction, as well as on travel writing. Julia is currently working on a comparative study
of German and British nineteenth-century realist fiction.
41
W. S. Gilbert and the Reality of False Spectres
Rebecca Lloyd
Before embarking on his high profile and successful career as librettist to the music of Sullivan, W.
S. Gilbert produced humorous materials for Fun, the nearest rival to Punch. He mocked the
attitudes and mores of contemporary society, both in articles and a series of verses later collected
together as Bab Ballads. While Gilbert’s targets were wide ranging, this paper will focus on the
motif of ghosts or haunting, something that he had already tackled while he was a student. Gilbert
frequently displayed in his work an antithetical stance to authority of all kinds, and in his use of the
ghost he clearly found a useful vehicle through which to critique those who abused their power and
used their power to abuse. He was also a severe critic of those who used fakery during the rage for
séances, despite being himself fully prepared to use spectres as a narrative device in his early plays
and finally in the controversial Savoy Opera Ruddigore.
Gilbert leaves it to the reader or the audience to decide whether ghosts are ‘real’ or ‘fake’. The
representations of ghosts often serve in Gilbert’s verses and plays as outsiders looking at the living,
frequently as the refracted image of that life, and always with some comment to make on the world.
They are entirely fictitious, visibly functioning to enable often clichéd romantic resolutions for
convoluted plots. By contrast his articles fiercely denouncing sham séances as pathetic moneygrubbing exercises are targeted at the perpetrators, rather than debunking the existence of ghosts.
He declaims against the very theatricality he himself uses in his own work, but he leaves the ghost
alone. So this paper will explore the contradictory mode of Gilbert’s writing to raise questions about
what this has to say about fakery on stage and off.
Biography
Rebecca Lloyd is currently a Senior Lecturer at Falmouth University, teaching on the BA Hons
degrees in English and Creative Writing. Prior to this she worked in arts management and
exhibition, performance, production and script reading for independent companies in London and
the regions. After working as a Contracts Executive for the BBC, Rebecca moved to Cornwall. She
completed an MA in the History of Modern Art and Design at Falmouth in 1997, having a BA
(Hons) in Medieval and Modern History from Liverpool University in (1982). She also has just
graduated from the MA in Professional Writing at Falmouth University. Rebecca’s particular
interests are in all forms of comedy and humour; nineteenth century history, culture and
performance; the Gothic and the supernatural; and the politics of language. Conference papers
include representations of race in the music hall; the relationship of masculinity, language and
humour in radio; the supernatural in W. S. Gilbert’s Bab Ballads. Recent publications include coauthor of entry on Anne Rice for The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), and a
short fiction for Casting Shadow: Extraordinary Tales from New Writers (SilverWood Books,
2013).
42
‘Bound Hand and Foot to a Dead Woman, and Tormented by a Demon in Her Shape’: The
Convenient Untruths and Uncomfortable Realities of Female Drunkenness in Hard Times and
‘Janet’s Repentance’
Pam Lock
Behind the degeneration of Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife to a ‘dead woman’ lies an untold
history, an unexplained transition so stark as to leave ‘no trace’ of the woman he married eighteen
years before. Here habitual drunkenness has possessed a woman’s body and mind, changing her
from a young bride to a wasted and tormenting ‘it’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dickens chooses female
drunkenness to create the most foul and morally bankrupt woman he can imagine to support his
argument for legislation to give access to divorce to the working-classes in Hard Times (1854). In
contrast, Eliot’s portrayal of Janet Dempster in ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (Scenes from Clerical Life,
1857) focuses on Janet’s motives for drinking excessively and her route to abstinence through the
support of a Rechabite preacher, Mr Tryan. I will examine how the social hierarchies of drinking in
the mid-nineteenth century complicate gender readings of these female drunkards.
Eliot’s sharp critique of Hard Times in The Westminster Review (Oct. 1854) nonetheless praises his
‘least cultivated’ characters as his ‘most successful’, while Dickens, in his famous first letter to
Eliot (Jan. 1858) commends the ‘exquisite truth and delicacy’ of her stories. But what is meant by
truth is this context? For example, Eliot used her friend, Nancy Buchanan and her husband, as the
inspiration for the Dempsters. I will ask what implications biographical and documentary sources
have for the verisimilitude and authenticity of the characterisation of drinking women in these
fictions.
I will compare these openly fictional portrayals to the often equally fictional accounts of female
drinkers presented in contemporary newspapers and magazines, particularly the growing
temperance press. I will examine how these character studies relate to the long-standing cultural
idea in Britain that women’s drinking, as James Nicholls argues, is ‘morally and economically
ruinous’.
Biography
I am a part-time PhD student at the University of Bristol, UK (2012- ). The title of my project is
‘The Socio-cultural Connotations of Alcohol in Victorian British Fiction’. I have been exploring the
topic of alcohol’s representation in Victorian fiction since giving a paper on Stevenson’s use of rum
in Treasure Island at the ‘Drink and Colonialism’ workshop run by the University of Bristol’s
Centre for the Study of Colonial and Post-Colonial Societies (2010). This small but enjoyable
project inspired me to develop the topic for my MA dissertation (2011) to a study of the
representation of alcohol in the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson. The PhD project surveys a
broader chronological span, and examines a range of authors and texts.
43
“My Gipsy Women are not the Gipsy Women of the Theatre”: Authenticity and Its Effects in
the Representation of Romani/Gypsy People
Jodie Matthews
Best-selling author, Theodore Watts-Dunton, lamented in In Gipsy Tents (1880), that he could not
‘remember a single genuine Gipsy in a novel’, while he, at least, strove for authenticity beyond
stock characters. This paper examines the desire for the ‘authentic Gypsy’ in Victorian popular
fiction, an idea bound up with racist discourse, and suggests that it has had a lasting impact on the
construction of stereotypes of Romani/Gypsy people.1
In G. J. Whyte-Melville’s Black But Comely (1879), for instance, a novel profoundly interested in
appearance and performance, ‘Gypsiness’ is constructed as an authentic but initially hidden identity.
References to being a ‘real’ or ‘true Romany’ or ‘Gypsy’ abound, with the narrative drive towards
finding a true self reinforcing the text’s presentation of what an authentic Gypsy might be.
Authenticity is important to the coherence of other discourses: the ‘authentic’ Romani/Gypsy was
presumed to belong to a specific racial category, and authenticity is central to and complicates
notions of ‘passing’ or assimilating. The authentic Romani/Gypsy might pass as white, but race will
out and the project of passing falters. In other popular texts of the same period, Romani/Gypsy
identities are overwritten by evangelical Christian ones, and authentic faith complicates authentic
race.
Beyond literature, questions of authenticity regarding Romanies/Gypsies have preoccupied
legislators since their arrival in Britain, have interested scholars since the inception of Romani
Studies, and continue to trouble commentators today. This pernicious and persistent idea, explored
by ‘experts’ and popular fiction writers alike from the nineteenth century to the present, has real
effects on the lives of people who identify as Romani or Gypsy in Britain.
Biography
Jodie Matthews is a Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield. Her research on the
nineteenth-century representation of Romani people works across Humanities disciplines, drawing
on her background in Critical and Cultural Theory. Her latest work explores the relationships
between different groups of travellers in Victorian Britain: seasonal agricultural workers; canal boat
people; showpeople; Romani people; and Irish and Scottish Travellers.
My practice is to refer to ‘Romani’ or ‘Romani/Gypsy people’ when talking about ethnic identity, and ‘Gypsy’ or
‘Gipsy’ when quoting or referring to literary constructions. This reflects scholarly practice elsewhere and selfidentification by Romanies/Gypsies.
1
44
All Men Are Liars: Joseph Hocking’s Exploration of Authenticity, Artifice and Addiction
Annemarie McAllister
The title of this 1895 novel might suggest that it focuses upon women’s experience, but in fact the
main character is male, the gifted but impressionable Stephen Edgecumbe, whose struggles with the
cynicism of the title underlie the dramatic plot. Stephen’s story shows him trying, throughout his
dramatic life, to decide which of two main world-views is authentic, and which is untrue. Concepts
of hypocrisy, lying, and canting are set against ‘truth’ - but changeably applied to differing opinions
and people. Stephen becomes ‘The Duke’ in a paradoxical attempt at authenticity in which he
plumbs the depths, “everywhere is lies, filth, hell.” Reading Stephen’s story dramatises the dilemma
of whom to believe and trust, and fears about hypocrisy and deception. The plot developments work
to reproduce this experience, for the reader.
This paper takes a case study of a little-known novel by Hocking, one of three siblings who wrote
‘improving’ fiction, to show that such novels should not be underestimated. They may have been
intended to promote causes such as temperance, but did so by supplying much more than mere dry
propaganda or formulaic storylines. This, and similar titles, engaged readers in challenging debates
which proved very popular in the wider market (editions were into double figures by 1914). All but
forgotten now, such novels were truly popular fiction.
Biography
Annemarie McAllister (UCLan) works on UK temperance history, songs, and fiction, with several
articles and book chapters in this area. Her latest book, Demon Drink? Temperance and the
Working Class (2014) is a popular history to complement the three exhibitions she has curated,
including the ongoing virtual site at www.demondrink.co.uk.
45
Robert Louis Stevenson: Popularity, Image and Contesting Traditions
Duncan Milne
This proposed paper would present some of the key themes and findings of my current area of
research, the oscillating literary reputation of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Throughout the twentieth-century, RLS was remembered and represented chiefly as a successful
writer of popular children’s fiction: only within the last three decades has Stevenson taken a place
securely among the subjects of ‘valid’ critical analysis in academia. This re-evaluation raises
pertinent and challenging questions as to how we value texts: if Stevenson’s writing is validated, as
late twentieth-century criticism tended to do, by its resonance with the style of ‘canonical’ fields of
literary research, such as Modernism, is there not a concomitant disparagement of popular fiction as
an area worth studying?
In addressing this question, I will draw on the shifting emphases that were put on Stevenson’s work,
both during his own life and in the period following his death to ask how far RLS’s fall from
‘literary’ favour to outright dismissal was due to the content of his work, and how far it was due to
his connection, exaggerated by his estate, to a brand of sentimentality particularly associated with
the popular culture of the late-Victorian period. From this, the later critical willingness to conform
to the terms of the Modernist-era estimation of values, while attempting to rehabilitate Stevenson
within this framework, will be challenged and questioned.
Biography
I am currently studying toward a PhD on the subject of Robert Louis Stevenson and literary
traditions. I am a member of Edinburgh Napier’s Centre for Literature and Writing and am actively
involved in various projects to develop the university’s reputation for expertise in Stevenson
studies.
46
Hero or Villain: Self-Serving Radicalism in the Publication of the Work of G. W. M. Reynolds
Jamie Morgan
This paper will focus upon the issue of authenticity and artifice in relation to the publication of the
works of G. W. M. Reynolds, one of the most popular novelists in Britain during the Victorian era.
As newspaper proprietor and one time Chartist, Reynolds is often seen as a doyen of Victorian
radicalism. However, the genuineness of his commitment has often been questioned.
In addressing these ambivalent attitudes, two aspects of his publication techniques will be focused
upon: firstly, his on-going attempts from the mid-1840s to ensure the cheap availability of his
writings; and secondly, his heavy use of paratexts. The talk will indicate the central role they played
in helping to construct his public image as the much vaunted ‘friend of the people’, fighting for
democratic rights. However, while ostensibly in line with his radical republicanism, it will also be
argued that their use was as much to do with self-promotion and commercial opportunism.
It will be demonstrated how Reynolds ‘played the literary market’, shifting from the expensive
middle-class formats of his early works, where he achieved only limited success, to suddenly
embrace the penny issues that exploited the emerging working-class market. In doing this the
inconsistencies of his stated attitudes towards cheap fiction will be highlighted.
Reynolds’s teetotal and Chartist activities will also be considered. These reveal his impulsive
tendency to participate temporarily in movements which he departed as precipitately as he had
joined. It will be suggested that while his radicalism was not necessarily fraudulent it was
equivocal, bound up with the desire to attain popularity through performing on the public stage and
position himself as a leading social figure which he ultimately achieved as the owner of weekly
journals and author of sensational novels.
Biography
Jamie Morgan is a faculty funded PhD student at the University of Sheffield in the department of
English Literature. Her doctoral thesis examines portrayals of working class protest in the midperiod novels of G. W. M. Reynolds.
47
Doing God’s Work with the Devil’s Tools: Narrativizing the Affect of Graphic Art in The
Sorrows of Satan
Colleen Morrissey
Marie Corelli’s novel The Sorrows of Satan (1895) is a fin-de-siècle Faust. Midway through the
novel, Satan orchestrates a series of Gothic-mystical tableaux vivants, various semi-static scenes of
sin, to entertain Europe’s belle monde. Without a doubt, Corelli intends here and throughout the
novel to condemn late-Victorian Decadent society. In the tableaux and elsewhere, Corelli targets the
Decadent novel form as an insidious, viral agent of sin. It would seem appropriate, then, in one of
her most transparently didactic scenes, to employ a non-lingual art form, the silent tableau vivant.
But, as other critics have pointed out, Corelli herself uses Decadent tropes – an apparent authorial
hypocrisy. Even the scholars who give Corelli credit for her popularism and generic
experimentation imagine her professional resentment or her spiritualistic eccentricities bursting
unconsciously through her writing to undercut her entire message. I argue that, rather than an
amateurish “excess” of sensationalism, Corelli’s tableaux self-consciously work together the tropes
of non-narrative popular theatrics to capture “real,” non-narrative experience. Corelli’s pseudoekphrastic invocation of the tableau vivant is a sophisticated appropriation of image and
performance into the medium of text, resulting in a more captivating show that could compete with
the diabolic tactics of her contemporaries. Live performance crosses denominational boundaries to
produce a holistic affective engagement which text is unable to provide. Like 21st-century American
Evangelical Christian “Hell Houses,” which attract thousands but persuade few who aren’t already
“born again,” Corelli’s novel is not so much about winning new souls to the Christian cause as it is
preaching to the choir. She employs the sensational (both sensual and melodramatic) for
authenticity and effectiveness and then applies moral knowledge – that is, the Christian narrative –
to non-narrative experience. But the key feature of narrativization is its retrospective nature; you
must already be converted to understand the warning.
Biography
Colleen Morrissey is a PhD student in English at Ohio State University, USA. She achieved her
MA at the University of Kansas. She is also a published author of fiction, and her story “Good
Faith” recently won an O. Henry Prize and appears in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014.
48
“A Fearful and Wonderful Institution:” Representing Law in Sensation Novels
Sara Murphy
“It is curious to note how much of modern fiction has a legal tone about it. Some its very best
efforts it owes to the law.” Thus observed a Belgravia essayist in 1869. But after that promising
beginning, the author goes on to take novelists to task; for, “while the law from the novelist’s point
of view, in truth, is often a fearful and wonderful institution,” it seems as though many of the
novelists who use legal themes and procedures to fuel their plots are rather ignorant about that
institution. Exempting from this reproach a certain “lady novelist” – most certainly Belgravia editor
Mary Elizabeth Braddon – the author offers several examples of mistakes about law or legal
procedure from recent novels. As it happens, these examples constitute a catalogue of nearly every
plot device most commonly associated with sensation fiction, from bigamy to lost or stolen wills to
murder. As the author ticks off examples of legal ignorance, the essay’s force shifts. A demand for
adherence to realist conventions suddenly itself becomes the outline of a sensation plot. This paper
poses the question of the significance of these “legal accidents,” that is to say mistakes or errors in
representing legal procedures and issues in popular fiction; I propose that legible in this apparent
critique of novelists’ deployment of law is a delineation of sensation as a sub-genre. According to
the Belgravia author, the accuracy of the depiction of law and its procedures both matters a good
deal – and doesn’t at all. Law is a resource for literary effect, which at once links the world of the
novel to the world outside it, and operates as an autonomous set of devices for the production of
ever more intricate and suspenseful plots. These novels are engaged with the conventions of
realism, but in a self-conscious manner that veers toward a cynicism about their audience. With
their appeal both to the general reader and the professional, sensation novels can play on and
perhaps even underscore the disaggregation of the discourses of law and literature; legal procedures
and institutions acquire a kind of shadow-life as literary devices.
Biography
I am on the faculty at New York University’s Gallatin School, a small predominantly undergraduate
college, where I teach courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, the intersections of
literary and legal discourses, and critical theory. I am currently completing a study of sensation
fiction and the law.
49
‘I Had Never Supposed It Possible That Any Foreigner Could Have Spoken English As He
Speaks It’. Mastering a Foreign Language in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
Maria Parrino
In Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Count Fosco is a man with a number of outstanding traits.
He is obese, he is eloquent and outspoken. Contrary to expectations, Fosco the foreigner is also very
much in command of the English language. As Marian admits, sometimes ‘it is almost impossible
to detect, by his accent, that he is not a countryman of our own, and as for fluency, there are very
few born Englishmen who can talk with as few stoppages and repetitions as the Count’. It looks like
the foreigner is more authentic than the native. The Italian Count Fosco is the foreigner who
‘passes’ for a native. His pronunciation is flawless, a trait that will be of concern to another count,
Dracula, more than thirty years later. Yet, the foreigner who speaks the language like a native is
disconcerting, it is as if he has trespassed and needs to be put back in his place. Fosco, the conjuror,
the juggler who plays with his mice, the chemist and the alchemist who concocts potions and food,
camouflages and distinguishes himself by what happens at the mouth, whether eating, speaking, or
simply by means of the ‘secret gentleness’ of his voice.
On the other hand, the English spoken by Pesca, – the professor who has taught his own language at
the University of Padua – sounds like a foreign parody of the standard language. Yet Pesca is very
much concerned about showing his gratitude to the country which has offered him hospitality and
struggles to turn himself into an Englishman.
The aim of this paper is to discuss the authentic and the artificial foreigner by investigating the
different roles played by the two Italian characters in the novel.
Biography
Maria Parrino is a full time teacher of English in a Secondary School in Vicenza, Italy. She has
written articles about Italian-American women’s autobiographies and has published textbooks on
short stories and Gothic Literature. In 2014 she discussed her PhD dissertation on 19th century
English Gothic Literature at the University of Bristol (UK).
50
The Skeleton out of the Closet: Authorship Identification in Dickens’s All the Year Round
Jeremy Parrott
In the late 19th century the early Dickens bibliographer F.G. Kitton had access to what he described
as an office set of All the Year Round – the periodical edited by Charles Dickens between its
inception in 1859 and the inimitable’s death in 1870. From the pages of that set he noted the
contributions that were the work of Dickens himself but neglected to make any record of who else
wrote what. All the contributions were anonymous, leaving the authorship of some 2,000 articles,
stories and poems unknown. The ‘office set’ then vanished without trace and scholars have been left
groping in the dark for well over a hundred years. In 1984 Ella Ann Oppenlander published her
monumental work on the journal, but only managed to make attributions (some of which were
merely tentative) to less than a third of the contents. Since then little progress has been made,
despite attempts to use computer technology to determine the authorship of certain pieces. Prepare
to be amazed! The ‘office set’ has resurfaced and is in my possession. It gives the authors of
virtually all the items that appeared in the journal between 1859 and 1868 (the end of the first
series). In this preliminary paper I will recount the story of the loss and rediscovery of this key set
of books and reveal some of the most important findings with respect to authorship (and nonauthorship!) of various features that appeared in the journal.
Biography
Dr Jeremy Parrott, formerly a Senior Lecturer in English with the University of Szeged, Hungary,
the British Council and the College of St. Mark and St. John, Plymouth, U.K. is an independent
scholar, bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller. Author of books on Samuel Beckett, Baroness
Orczy and Arthur Morrison. Numerous articles and conference papers on Beckett, literary
onomastics and English language teacher training. Current research interests focus on 19th century
bibliography (writing studies on W.H.G. Kingston and William Clark Russell. Also working on a
complete contributor list to All the Year Round (see above).
51
Rhia Rhama Rhoos or Khia Khan Khruse? Dickens’ Magical Artifice
Christopher Pittard
In summer 1849, a small group gathered at Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight to watch “The
Unparalled Necromancer Rhia Rhama Rhoos,” a magician “educated cabalistically in the Orange
Groves of Salamanca and the Ocean Caves of Alum Bay.” It is unlikely that many in the audience
know the means by which the magician’s marvellous effects are achieved; it is certain, however,
that they know that the unparalleled necromancer Rhia Rhama Rhoos is none other than Charles
Dickens. In this paper, I consider the connections between Dickens’ fiction and the art of conjuring,
what Simon During calls “secular magic.” My aims are twofold. Firstly, to explore the persona of
Rhia Rhama Rhoos as a Dickens character, a fiction based on the Indian conjuror Khia Khan
Khruse, a hugely popular performer of the early nineteenth century. What is at stake in Dickens
creating a character who is simultaneously Orientalist and domestic (trained, as he is, on the Isle of
Wight)? How is the body of the magician represented, given that Khruse made his name with
various physical feats? Secondly, I consider how reading conjuring in Dickens’ works (such as The
Old Curiosity Shop) invites a reconsideration of how his fiction interacts with popular entertainment
(for instance, challenging Paul Schlicke’s characterisation of the representation of such
entertainments as broadly nostalgic; rather than being in decline, in the mid-nineteenth century
stage magic was gaining in popularity as a heterotopic art crossing the boundaries between
theatrical space, public space, and the private parlour). I also consider the ways in which secular
magic can be theorised as a narrative of both wonder and of trauma, both bodily (the manner in
which Khruse’s act depended on distortions of his body, an aspect missing from Rhoos’
performance) and in terms of Cathy Caruth’s formulation of “unclaimed experience.”
Biography
Christopher Pittard is senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. His
publications include articles in Victorian Periodicals Review, Clues, and Women: A Cultural
Review, and the book Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction. He is a
member of the editorial boards of Clues: A Journal of Detection and The Journal of Popular
Culture and a faculty member of the UCSC Dickens Project.
52
Hidden from History: Wilkie Collins’s Inheritance Plots
Julia Podziewska
This paper contends that a full understanding of the popularity and resonance of Collins’s stellar
novels requires recognition of the role played by inheritance plots in each. The structural primacy of
the inheritance plot is shown with reference to The Woman in White and Collins’s textual practice is
located within wider debate and practice about property transmission during mid-Victorian Britain,
and then, in turn, within the wider historical development of 19th century British capitalism. The
paper then moves on to its central task: an interrogation of the silence that surrounds inheritance and
plot in general in Collins scholarship – a silence related to prevailing conceptualisations of property
and material culture.
The palpability of the inheritance plot, as demonstrated in the opening analysis, suggests that if
inheritance and plot and the inheritance plot have been hidden from critical purview, this cannot be
attributed to the text. It needs be located in prevailing critical practice. The paper then moves to
give a number of reasons for the occlusion of the inheritance plot within the academy; it closes by
advocating a critical practice that enables plot to be recognised as an historical form.
Biography
I am at Sheffield Hallam University completing a PhD entitled ‘Wilkie Collins: the Inheritance
plot’; this explores the novel and property forms instituted by the Companies Acts of 1844-56.
Following a BA at the University for York, I was awarded an MA by research for the thesis
‘Towards a Chronotope of Sensation Fiction’ at University of Warsaw.
53
“More Like a Woman Stuck into Boy’s Clothes”: Sexual Deviance in Florence Marryat’s Her
Father’s Name
Catherine Pope
Her Father’s Name (1876) is one of Marryat’s most radical and intriguing novels, featuring Leona
Lacoste, a cross-dressing heroine, and Lucilla Evans, a textbook hysteric who falls in love with her.
For centuries, the diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ was conveniently applied to any woman who exhibited
transgressive behaviour, whether it be through sexual promiscuity or simply by expressing strong
opinions. As I argue in this paper, Marryat uses her novel to reveal how in the late nineteenth
century, hysteria was clearly linked with lesbianism and used to pathologise sexual deviance. Using
the character of a family doctor, Marryat shows how the medical profession operated to regulate
gender, expose artifice, and restore patients to ‘normative’ sexuality.
I discuss how the doctor is thwarted by the willingness of the other characters to collude in Leona’s
disguise - they accept both her transvestism and her often reciprocal attraction to women. Whereas
in many contemporary novels masculine women are feared and derided as vectors of lesbian
contagion, Leona is portrayed as an entirely sympathetic character. Through her, Marryat allows
women a greater range of sexual expression, presenting lesbianism as an alternative to heterosexual
marriage, rather than as an ugly subversion of the feminine ideal.
Leona’s protean nature, I propose, allows Marryat to explore radical ideas in what is, on the surface,
a pantomimic text, but one that yields deeply subversive readings. In Leona she presents a heroine
who comprehensively challenges prevailing notions of both femininity and sexuality.
Biography
Catherine Pope graduated from the University of Sussex in 2014 with a PhD on feminism in the
novels of Florence Marryat. She now teaches research and digital skills to postgraduates (see
www.theDigitalResearcher.com). Catherine is also the founder of Victorian Secrets, an independent
press dedicated to publishing books from and about the nineteenth century.
54
Ellen Wood’s Parkwater (1875)
Anne-Louise Russell
In Parkwater, Ellen Wood depicts the life Sophia May whose working-class mother attempts to
bring her up to be a lady. Parkwater was first published in serial form in W H Ainsworth’s New
Monthly Magazine in 1857, and in her article entitled ‘A “base and spurious thing”: Reading and
Deceptive Femininity in Ellen Wood’s Parkwater (1857)’ (Critical Survey, 2011, Vol 23 (1) pp. 824), Janice M Allan connects the text with anxieties about deceptive femininity which were
provoked by the Madeline Smith trial, and she suggests that Wood delivers a warning to New
Monthly’s male readers about ‘about “false or low-quality” women “masquerading as worthy items”
within the marriage market’ (2011: 18). However, in the 1870s Wood reprinted a revised and
extended version of her novella three times within two years: Parkwater was serialised in Argosy
between January and September 1875, it also formed the first volume of Told in the Twilight
(1875), and was published again as Parkwater and Other Stories in 1876. This paper focuses on the
1870s version of Parkwater, in which Wood ambitiously challenges her reader to feel sympathy for
a protagonist, who kills her own child, after she is seduced and betrayed by a gentleman, who is
described by Wood as a ‘false man’. Sophia was not born a lady, but equally Captain Devereux’s
conduct is not that of a gentleman. I argue that this version of Parkwater was specific to its moment
of publication, and facilitated a literary engagement with legislation which attempted to address the
alarming rates of infant mortality, which were highest in children born out of wedlock, and feminist
campaigns which sought to relocate the blame for infant death rates from women’s negligence to
male irresponsibility.
Biography
Anne-Louise Russell is a PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, where she also
gained her BA (Hons) and MA in English Literature. Her research project examines the work which
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, Charlotte Riddell and Florence Marryat produced in a
unique literary moment between 1872 and 1876, when these successful novelists were the only
women who were in the influential position of writing sensation fiction and editing literary
magazines.
55
Artifice for Art’s Sake: Sensation, Embellishment and Watson’s Narration in the Adventures
of Sherlock Holmes
Terry Scarborough
During the early nineteenth century, England witnessed profound shifts in perception of social
stability amidst social, political and economic unrest. In response, the literary market was impacted
by a growing demand for information reading in the form of newspapers and popular periodicals.
Such reading was often coded as edifying through heightened attention to scientific enquiry and
acute awareness of the constantly changing social environment, a phenomenon which fuelled
attempts to classify and impose order on growing and turbulent urban geographies. Parliamentary
reports, the new urban journalism and sensational depictions of crime and urban exploration
eventually led to a popular interest in the literature of detection through which social anxieties about
unstable social geographies were often mediated. By the late century, and amid heightened concerns
with urban degeneration, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes became firmly established as an icon of
empiricism and reason; today, these works continue to be interpreted in this light despite a number
of critical studies which address Holmes’s employment of distinctly unscientific practices.
Although rooted in scientific reason and compulsive indexing, Holmes’s methods continually defy
and question the very categories the genre has been credited with reinforcing. Through blurring
social and physical boundaries, Holmes engages Victorian anxieties by freely transgressing spacial
and social borders while Watson’s accounts of the cases continually embellish the events. Holmes’s
repeated admonishment of Watson’s tendency toward sensation amplifies a dichotomy within the
narratives by which the boundary between artifice and reality is in constant question. I contend that
by testing the limits of realism, Doyle’s stories expose and exploit crucial questions regarding
literature’s role in negotiating late Victorian urban landscapes. Through analysis of narrative
embellishment in the Adventures, this paper examines the tension between artifice and reality as a
crucial element in the popular reception of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Biography
Terry Scarborough is College Professor in the Department of English at Okanagan College, British
Columbia Canada, where he teaches Victorian and Gothic literature, British literature, popular
narrative and composition. He has presented and published widely on the Victorian city and family,
the Victorian and Edwardian Gothic, Dickens, narratives of urban exploration, nineteenth-century
animals, and Sherlock Holmes. His current research interests involve animal agency in Victorian
texts and treatment of sanitary reform in the works of Dickens. Currently, he is working on a
monograph which explores animals – specifically dogs – in the works of Dickens.
56
‘I Don’t Know What I Did Believe’: Narrative Authenticity and Control in Emmuska Orczy’s
Mysteries of London
Rachel Smillie
As a genre, detective fiction has tended to privilege an idea of ‘truth’, positioning the detective’s
solution to the mystery as an objective reality, and the only means by which coherence and order
can be restored to the chaos produced by the crime. The power associated with the detective’s
narrative solution is inherently linked to the detective’s status as storyteller or writer. As Peter
Thoms explains, the detective occupies a position of ‘authorial mastery’, exercising control over the
narrative and its characters: ‘as a storyteller [the detective] defines his superiority, conquering the
ostensible criminal by absorbing him and his deviant plot within his own controlling story,
defeating his rivals by presenting a convincing narrative of explanation’ (Thoms 1998, p.3). First
published in the Royal Magazine, Emmuska Orczy’s detective series Mysteries of London (1901)
problematizes the traditional identification of the detective with narrative authenticity and control.
Orczy’s armchair detective, the ‘Man in the Corner’, offers solutions to major criminal cases to a
journalist who narrates the series. Often unconvinced by the detective/storyteller, the unnamed
journalist pushes, prompts and interrogates his narrative, questioning it at every turn. As a result,
the objectivity of the detective’s denouement is undermined and the ‘truth’ of the narrative is
contested. Yet, while these tales interrogate the authenticity of the detective’s narrative at the level
of the plot, they are also subject to a significant textual rewriting; between the original publication
of the series and the appearance of the collected edition The Old Man in the Corner a shift in
narration occurs which fundamentally alters the tales. This paper will address the complex dynamic
of authenticity and authority explored in the original Mysteries of London and will consider the
problematic impact of Orczy’s later revisions.
Biography
Rachel Smillie is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Aberdeen. She has recently
submitted her thesis ‘The Lady Vanishes: Women Writers and the Development of Detective
Fiction’ which focuses on overlooked and forgotten writers. Other research interests include writing
partnerships, literary influence, and gender and genre roles.
57
Constructing the Colonial Nation: H. Rider Haggard and the Collapse of the Zulu
Kathryn Simpson
In 1890 English adventure romance novelist H. Rider Haggard wrote in the New Review, of the
increasing European presence in South Africa; ‘the black man, indeed, is doomed.’2 He was
adamant that within three generations the native people would be almost gone from Southern
Africa. Haggard’s certainty of this was intertwined with what he saw as the definitive world order;
that in which British Imperialism was paramount. How he reconciled this belief with his admiration
of Zulu culture and traditional is nowhere more evident than in his 1912-1917 trilogy Zikali. In the
Zikali trilogy Haggard tells the history of the Zulu, weaving his narrative through with fictional
elements linking his bestselling fictional character, Allan Quatermain, with the destruction of the
Zulu nation. Haggard challenges the notion that British Imperialism is a force for good; his novels
evidence a clear link between the expansion of British Imperialism and the subsequent eradication
of native peoples’ geopolitical and social structures.
The history that Haggard writes about in his fiction is neither collusive nor consensual with the
people he writes of. If anything his work provides a fragmentary and elusive glimpse of native
Southern African history. It offers an insight into nineteenth-century Zulu culture rarely found in
other fiction from the period. In analysing the Zikali trilogy it is possible to see how Haggard
constructed an Imperial image of the Zulu people which was to endure in British popular culture
late into the 20th century.
Biography
I am currently in the write up stage of my PhD, which is a revisionist reading of H. Rider Haggard’s
early twentieth century trilogy, Zikali, and a zero hours lecturer in the Centre of Literature and
Writing at Edinburgh Napier University. I am also the Project Scholar for Livingstone Online, The
David Livingstone archive.
2
H. Rider Haggard, ‘The Fate of Swaziland’, The New review, 2 (1890). pp. 64-75.
58
Charles Reade and the ‘Matter-of-Fact’ Short Story: Reconsidering the Contributions to
Bentley’s Miscellany
Derek Stewart
‘Sometimes I say it must be dangerous to overload fiction with facts’ notes novelist and playwright
Charles Reade, arguing that ‘[a]t others, I think fiction has succeeded in proportion to the amount of
fact in it’ (Memoir, 1887). The act of balancing fact and fiction informed Reade’s compositional
method, and this reflection encapsulates the endeavour for authenticity which permeates Reade’s
literary career. Reade based his fiction on facts, constructing narratives which are a complex weave
of non-fiction, realism and sensation by drawing inspiration from newspaper clippings, interviews
and personal observations. As Michael Hammet notes, Reade also insisted that his plays presented a
sense of realistic detail. In his staging of It Is Never Too Late to Mend, Reade’s employment of a
real treadmill as a means by which to condemn the brutalities of the nineteenth-century penal
system is an example of his literal appeal to realism (Plays by Charles Reade, 1986). While the
small body of criticism which relates to Reade’s work has been preoccupied with his novels and
plays, it is clear that the author also experimented with numerous other literary forms, and this
paper will examine the short stories which Reade contributed to Bentley’s Miscellany. Rather than
suggesting that these stories exist merely as curiosities within the author’s neglected canon, I will
argue that, despite Reade’s disdain of the short story form, ‘The Box Tunnel’ (1853), ‘Art: A
Dramatic Tale’ (1854) and ‘Clouds and Sunshine’ (1854) serve to exist as examples of texts in
which Reade successfully equilibrates the tensions that arise between authenticity and artifice.
Biography
I am a first year PhD student at the University of Aberdeen. My research explores the theatricality
of urban settings within the nineteenth-century novel, suggesting that, throughout works by Charles
Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, city spaces can be considered as an embodiment of the
novelist’s theatrical failure.
59
‘God’s Proper World’: Hall Caine, Authenticity, and the Fashioning of ‘Manxland’
Richard Storer
In 1894, Lord Rosebery, the Liberal Prime Minister, wrote to the novelist Hall Caine to congratulate
him on his new best seller The Manxman, praising him for his ‘consummate skill’ as a literary artist
and assuring him that the novel would ‘rank with the great works of English fiction’. Rosebery
particularly admired the ‘delightful originality’ of the two main dialect-speaking characters, and
affirmed that ‘were there but a single Pete or Caesar left in Manxland I would hurry to the island.’
Rosebery had pinpointed a major factor in the extraordinary popularity of Caine’s novels in the
1890s – the charms of the miniaturised social world of ‘Manxland’ as Caine called it. But
Rosebery’s comment also implies that he knows this world does not really exist. On the Island
itself, Caine faced criticism that his depiction was not authentic and was even plagiarised from other
sources.
In this paper I want to explore Caine’s problems with authenticity, in both his fashioning of
‘Manxland’ and his own self-fashioning as a literary artist. I will suggest that he provides an
interesting case study of the difficulty, in the late Victorian period, of combining the public profile
of a popular novelist with recognition as an authentic literary artist.
The Manxman can be seen as a turning-point in this struggle. Before The Manxman Caine had
achieved some credibility as a literary figure – after it he was increasingly stigmatised for his
commercial success and self-promotion. The novel itself dramatizes the problem of authenticity on
several levels, as the main character Philip agonises over the illusion of public virtue on which his
success as a popular leader is based (a plot device criticised for being plagiarised from The Scarlet
Letter); and the narrative leaves open the question of whether Philip or his humbler cousin Pete is
the authentic Manxman of the title.
Biography
Dr Richard Storer is Associate Principal Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University. He has
published several essays on the two popular Victorian ‘Manx’ authors, the novelist Hall Caine and
the dialect poet T. E. Brown. He is also the author of the volume F. R. Leavis in the Routledge
Critical Thinkers series.
60
Ellen Terry as an Aesthetic Symbol: The Changing Status of the Actress in Victorian England
Sandra Gómez Todó
The status of actresses and female performers during the Victorian era was conditioned by the strict
and double moral judgments of the middle-class, which usually associated these figures with an
uncontrolled form of sexuality and femininity that defied the model of the “angel of the house.”
However, in the last decades of the nineteenth century a series of actresses established a
professional and artistic identity that helped to contradict these ideas.
John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1888-89), defined as a tour de force
by several scholars, created one of the most memorable images of the actress fused with her
character. At the same time, it became a statement of her celebrity and influence as an aesthetic
symbol. This portrait, which depicts her in Henry Irving’s production of Macbeth, consolidated the
image of Ellen Terry as an icon of the fin-de-siècle British aesthetic movement. Terry’s symbolic,
ethereal and delicate beauty was already part of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic as we will observe in
the portraits of the actress by George Frederick Watts and Julia Margaret Cameron.
Using these examples as a starting point, I will explore the status of Ellen Terry not just as an icon
of the late-Victorian stage but also as an example of the use of the visual arts as a medium for
actresses to construct their identities. Through the analysis of the works mentioned above, along
with others, I will study Terry’s self-promotion on and off the stage, her dramatic repertoire, her
mise-en-scène, her self-fashioning strategies and her connections with aesthetic circles. By doing
this, I will present the actress’ strategies, along with her contemporaries, for legitimizing her
intellectual and professional status as an artist and performer and the role played by the aesthetic
movement in the process.
Biography
Sandra Gómez Todó is a first-year Ph.D. student in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century European
art and a Fulbright scholar at the University of Iowa. She received a B.A. in Art History from the
Autonomous University of Madrid and an M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and
Thought from the Pompeu Fabra University. For her Ph.D. research, Sandra is exploring the
relationships between theatre, appearance, performance and visual arts as well as their convergence
in the construction of identity and gender.
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The ‘Wooden Man’ and the ‘Possible Person’: Prosthesis, Personhood and the Minor
Character in Our Mutual Friend
Clare Walker-Gore
I will begin this paper by pointing out how Silas Wegg’s artificial limb is used as a metaphor for his
moral inauthenticity in Our Mutual Friend. Using Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell’s concept of
disability as a form of ‘narrative prosthesis’, I will argue that Silas’s wooden leg is made to
represent his moral inadequacy, symbolising his hard heart and his insincerity, as when he is
described as a ‘wooden man’. I will then explore Silas’s quest to find his missing leg bone,
suggesting that Silas’s desire for physical wholeness actually represents his desire for the
personhood he is denied in the text, as a minor character whose expulsion from the novel is crucial
for its tidy resolution. Attempting to write his own plot-line and challenge his narrative
subordination, Silas is a rebellious minor character who is accordingly punished, dehumanised by
disability, and objectified by (and even as) prosthesis. By contrast, another disabled character,
Jenny Wren, has a crutch that is made to represent courage, stoicism and creativity. In a famously
hostile review of Our Mutual Friend, Henry James asked “what we get in return for accepting Miss
Jenny Wren as a possible person”; I will argue that in fact her personhood rests upon her
willingness to accept her status as a minor character in the novel, as Silas does not. Drawing on
Alex Woloch’s ideas about minor characters as the subordinated proletariat of the Victorian novel,
and through exploring the widely divergent representations of disability personified by Silas and
Jenny, I will discuss Dickens’s wider use of disability in his fiction as a means to represent the
disabling of minor characters as characters by their distortion. In this late, great novel, Dickens tests
the limits for ‘possible personhood’ through his representation of prostheses, ultimately allowing
the reader to see and even pity the exploitation and subordination of the disabled minor character.
Biography
I am a fourth-year PhD student at Selwyn College, Cambridge, shortly handing in my thesis,
“Plotting Disability: Physical Difference, Characterisation and the Form of the Novel, 1837-1901”,
which mainly focuses on novels by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Dinah Craik and Charlotte
Yonge. I have contributed to the collection Queer Victorian Families (Routledge, February 2015)
and have published articles in Nineteenth-Century Contexts (26.4) and Nineteenth-Century Gender
Studies (10.1).
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Sheer Sensationalism or Authentic Advice: Mrs Henry Wood’s Embedded Childrearing
Manuals
Tamara Wagner
The proposed paper analyses the genre boundaries and crossings within the newly proliferating
publications on childrearing in Victorian Britain. The fiction of Mrs Henry (Ellen) Wood offers a
test case of how popular culture could exploit and criticise as well as reflect the new uncertainty
about motherhood that was emerging as parenting practices were changing in middle-class
households, producing a demand for systematic advice by so-called experts. Wood persistently
worked her own ideas about what she considered the right kind of parenting into her fiction. She
thereby often eschewed expert knowledge to exemplify the growing trend to publish “suggestions
by a mother” in manuals and magazines specifically targeted at mothers such as The Christian
Mother’s Magazine, The British Mother’s Magazine, Mothers in Council, and later, Baby and
Babyhood. But if Wood’s early attempts to embed practical suggestions within her sensation novels
by using moralising narratorial addresses create genre ruptures, her novels increasingly move from
interpolating to integrating this advice within murder mysteries. As she welds these narrative
agendas together, she renders debates or prevailing uncertainties about specific aspects of
childrearing central to the crimes she describes. George Canterbury’s Will (1870) illustrates how
Wood simultaneously produces a cautionary tale about common household accidents, even as the
depicted incident is ultimately exposed as premeditated murder. A child’s medicine bottles are
confused by an incapable servant, on whose illiteracy the murderer has counted. Lengthy
discussions of childcare arrangements, the choice and supervision of nursemaids, and altogether the
mother’s presence in the nursery, moreover, have carefully prepared the scene. Wood was
genuinely interested in debates on childrearing and used her intensely popular fiction as a vehicle to
propound her advice, while she indisputably also capitalised on the sensational effects of the
resulting cautionary tales.
Biography
Tamara S. Wagner obtained her PhD from Cambridge University and is currently Associate
Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Recent books include Financial
Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-1901 (2010), as well
as edited collections on Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel (2009), Victorian Settler Narratives
(2011), and Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand (2014).
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“The Unmistakable Mark of the Beast”1: The Photograph and Nineteenth-Century
Narratives of Enfreakment
Treena Warren
Like the anthropomorphic inhabitants of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Wonderland’, and the ‘Beast-Folk’ in H.
G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, the performers in Victorian freak shows were often styled as
human-animal hybrids such as the ‘Camel Girl’, the ‘Two-Headed Nightingale’ and the famous
‘Elephant Man’. The photograph was a crucial agent of this kind of promotion, used in advertising
and sold as souvenirs, and this paper will explore how its unique status as both an ‘authentic’ record
of the empirical environment and an aesthetically contrived representation of it, enabled narratives
of natural history, Gothic horror and nineteenth-century celebrity culture, to converge in a spectacle
that was simultaneously fabulous and monstrous. In light of Darwin’s theory of evolution, such
human-animal conflations would have also provoked disturbing questions regarding what it means
to be ‘authentically’ human, and what degrees of difference/similarity existed between human and
animal ontologies, concerns reflected in contemporary debate and popular literature, including
Wilkie Collins’ Heart and Science (1883) on vivisection, Gothic tales of bestial humans such as
Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890) and Kipling’s ‘The Mark of the Beast’ (1899), as well
as in Carroll’s talking rabbit and frog footmen and Wells’ grotesque and frightening zoological
experiments.
While the freak show is essentially a discourse of entertainment, that incorporates long-standing
interpretations of the anomalous body as a natural marvel or portent, the nineteenth century also
saw the emergence of a parallel, medical discourse that defined physical difference as pathological.
I will also consider how photography helped to shape competing notions of corporeal disparity as
‘authentic’ natural phenomenon, and as pathological condition in need of the ‘artifice’ of medical
correction: concepts that still remain in conflict today.
Biography
Treena Warren is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Sussex, where she is researching
manifestations of the horrific in nineteenth-century photography.
From H.G. Wells The Island of Dr. Moreau. London / Vermont: Everyman, 1993. (p 40).
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65
Sex, Film, and the Brontës: Selling Victorian Eroticism in Modern Adaptations
Heather Williams
In anticipation of the film’s release in 2011, W Magazine devoted a cover story to Cary Fukunaga’s
adaptation of Jane Eyre, featuring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender as Jane and Rochester.
In the magazine’s glossy, stylized photo spread, Wasikowska and Fassbender wear vaguely modern
clothing that reveal enough skin to make us think they might be ripping each other’s shirts off – or
perhaps they are just putting them back on. Their bodies are intertwined and those might be droplets
of sweat on their brows and heaving chests. Later that
same year, Andrea Arnold premiered her adaptation
of Wuthering Heights. The promotional campaign
features photographs of the actors in striking weatherworn period attire, however, the sparse, windy West
Yorkshire landscape dominates each shot, to a
sexualized, fetishized degree. To use a term recentlycoined in social media, the photographs present the
film as “landscape porn” (or, for the Instragram
crowd, #landscapeporn).
In my paper, I discuss the portrayal of sex and
eroticism in recent film adaptations of both Jane Eyre
and Wuthering Heights, particularly how each novel’s
sexual underpinnings are marketed prior to the film’s
release. The ways the authors reveal and withhold
details about their characters’ sex lives present certain
challenges to directors and the modern film industry,
whose audience has a relatively high tolerance for
explicit visual representations of sex, yet hold
directors responsible for preserving the “Victorianness” of the novels. On the other hand, marketing
campaigns are only expected to sell the essence of the stories, and are not bound by a novel’s plot,
characterization, or Victorian methods of coding erotic desire in order to entice the public. By
analyzing a variety of promotional efforts used to advertise these films, my presentation will
explore the dynamics between Victorian presentations of desire in literature and recent portrayals of
sex in film translations.
Biography
I am a doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. My
focus is Victorian literature, especially mid-century novels, the Brontës, and nineteenth-century
psychiatry and representations of mental illness. I am also interested in film studies and film
adaptations of nineteenth-century literature.
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“There is an Air of Veracity – Quite out of the Melodramatic Region of Sensation Tales”:
William Gilbert’s Shirley Hall Asylum and the Rejection of Artifice
Sarah Wise
William Gilbert’s 1863 novel Shirley Hall Asylum: The Memoirs of a Monomaniac was wellreviewed and sold well, but it flummoxed reviewers with regard to its style, tone and genre. It was
published at the height of Sensation Fiction, and it concerned itself with mental illness and extreme
psychological states; yet it had a notably ‘old-fashioned’ narrative style – sober, highly detailed,
non-melodramatic, and without any seeming ‘artifice’. This paper probes Gilbert’s adherence to the
narrative style of his literary ‘hero’ Daniel Defoe, confounding the expectations of a readership by
now used to the artifices of plot-driven fiction (or ‘the jaded palate craving coarse and vicious
condiments’ as one reviewer described the taste for Sensation Fiction).
Biography
Sarah Wise has an MA in Victorian Studies from Birkbeck College and teaches nineteenth-century
social history and fiction at the Bishopsgate Institute. Sarah’s first book, The Italian Boy: Murder
and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (Jonathan Cape, 2004) won the Crime Writers’ Association
Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
Her second, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (Bodley Head, 2008),
was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize; and her third, Inconvenient
People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (Bodley Head, 2012) was
shortlisted for the 2014 Wellcome Book Prize.
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‘A Universe of Soapsuds’ – Bubbles, Matter and the Marketplace in H.G. Wells
Matthew Wraith
Tono Bungay, H.G. Wells’ 1909 novel set mostly in Victorian England recounts the story of the
narrator George Ponderevo who gets roped in to his wide-eyed, eccentric and haphazardly
ambitious Uncle Edward in helping to market a quack tonic elixir, Tono-Bungay, as a healing and
invigorating cure-all. The patent launches the pair on a long adventure upwards through the
ascending strata of Edwardian Society. It is a novel in dialogue with the physics and chemistry of its
time, hinging fundamentally on the distinction between simple and inert matter and the rhetorical
energies by which it is animated.
It is a novel full of bubbles and ebullience. Wells continually imagines society as a whole as a kind
of aerated matter; his London subject to a ‘yeasty English expansion’, world commercial
civilisation ‘a swelling, thinning bubble of assurances’, or a ‘universe of soapsuds’. Though Wells
was taught by the famous ‘bubble scientist’ Charles Vernon Boys and brought to the long
established metaphor of a ‘market bubble’ some practical scientific knowledge of exactly what a
soap bubble was and how it worked, bubbles still appears in his work as quasi-fictional, fantastic
entities, a nothing pretending to be something, a ruse of substance.
The narrator, George, finds this blending of matter and fantasy maddening and seeks a way out
through science and engineering. In this, he is like his creator and a host of wellsian devotees in the
twentieth century. The economy, it was believed could be put right through being translated into
scientific language, conceived as a system of matter and energy. Yet the developing science of
radioactivity with which Tono Bungay engages, and the concomitant remodeling of the atom,
revealed a similar vacancy within matter itself, a similar ruse within substance. The universe of
soapsuds is confirmed rather than rectified by science.
Biography
Matthew Wraith teaches Literature in the Humanities Department at Imperial College, London and
is a short-term fellow at the Leeds Humanities Research Institute at Leeds University. He completed
his PhD at the London Consortium in 2011, writing his thesis on the literary and artistic
engagement with noise in the early twentieth century. He has written on Literature and technology,
H.G. Wells and the philosopher Michel Serres.
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